The Many Faces of Har---er, Adira Potter
by Fayanora
Summary: Harry Potter is a wizard, which surprises him. But Harry Potter is also a Multiple, which surprises everyone. But that's not the end of the surprises. Note: Trans!Harry eventually. This part is complete. The story will continue as "The Many Faces Go To War." Check my profile or subscribe to my author page for updates.
1. Feeling Sic

The Many Faces of Harry Potter

By = Fayanora

Chapter One: Feeling Sic

Harry Potter was awoken by the sound of banging on the ceiling above him as his cousin Dudley stomped and screamed at him. It was Dudley's birthday, and this made Harry dread the day even more. But, meek little slave that his aunt and uncle had made of him, he got up and went about the business of cooking breakfast for his relatives. At least it being Dudley's birthday, Harry would have one day away from them when Dudley got taken to the zoo. True, it meant he would have to put up with Mrs. Figg's many cats and her obsession over them, but that would be a welcome respite from cleaning and gardening. His life was such that he felt like he could cry all the time, but he'd stopped being able to do so years back. So anything that made him feel a little less miserable was good to him.

Thankfully, he managed to cook the food without burning anything, and his aunt and uncle seemed satisfied. Well, they seemed like they could find nothing to complain about but telling him to comb his hair, anyway. That was practically a cheerful 'Hello' for them, though.

Dudley, of course, was a spoiled little brat. Where Harry was the secret shame of the family, Dudley was the golden boy who could do no wrong, even though he was morbidly obese, a nasty bully, and a spoiled rotten brat. But to Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia, he was perfect.

 _ **His very shit might as well be made of gold bouillon, they way they carry on about the great lump,**_ came the inner commentary of the sardonic aspect of his mind. He almost snorted with laughter, but luckily held it in before it could escape.

 _It's very sad, the way they treat him,_ said another part of his mind, one that sounded motherly.

 _ **Oh?**_ asked the Sardonic Harry voice.

 _Yes. That is not a healthy weight, to say nothing of his personality. And everything he's witnessed them do to you..._

He sighed. He knew, of course, that his situation wasn't normal. He knew it wasn't normal for one child to be worked half to death, abused, and neglected while the other one got everything the other didn't get. He knew his aunt and uncle were messed up in the head. Of course, there was nothing to be done about that; he was too afraid of retribution to report the situation to an adult. Too afraid that instead of being taken away from the Dursleys, he'd end up beaten to death. Or worse; beaten to within an inch of death and forced to work through the pain.

So when Mrs. Figg was indisposed to watch him, and none of the others the Dursleys could count on to keep the secret were able to watch him, and they reluctantly let him come to the zoo with them rather than let him have free reign of the house, he knew it was too good to be true.

The whole time there, he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Every time something good would happen, like he got a lemon ice lolly because it was easier than explaining to the zoo employee why he wasn't allowed one, or he got to eat a giant ice cream because Dudley wasn't satisfied with its size, he just _knew_ something bad was going to happen. And the better things went, the worse he knew the end result would be. Still, a part of him did dare to hope, to dream, to be a little happy.

He ended up in the reptile house, looking with fascination at the snakes and other reptiles, but Dudley and his friend Piers were being prats and banging on the glass, among other annoying things. Normally frightened or resigned at this behavior, he felt an inexplicable surge of annoyance, even anger. He glared at them as they went across the room, then sourly looked over at the snake they'd been bothering.

"Sorry about that," he said in a voice that was his but slightly different; he recognized it as Sardonic Harry speaking aloud. "Stupid prat does worse to me, though, so count your blessings."

The snake looked up at him, actually lifting its head as though it understood him.

"What? You can't understand me, can you?"

The snake looked momentarily confused, then nodded.

"Oh. Well, stranger stuff has happened to me, so okay. Let's go with that. Where you from?"

The snake pointed its tail at the sign that said it was from Brazil.

"Brazil, eh? What was that like?"

The snake once again pointed. Harry read the sign again, which was getting difficult. He took his glasses off and it cleared up, which he thought was odd, but he was used to weird things happening by now. And he was talking to a snake, which was very weird indeed.

"Ah, bred in captivity. Yeah, I know how that feels. I never knew my parents either."

Just then, Piers shouted that the snake was doing something interesting, and he and Dudley pushed Harry aside. Harry felt a surge of rage, glaring with clenched teeth at the two idiots. As he did, the glass disappeared, and the two boys screamed in surprise.

Feeling a vindictive pleasure he'd never felt before, he looked at the snake and said, "Sic em!"

The snake looked confused a moment, then shot forward to try to bite them. It was, of course, a boa constrictor, and therefore was not venomous, but Piers and Dudley didn't know that. They screamed, and Harry laughed with a vindictive glee. The part of his mind that told him this was very very bad was quiet, and he just grinned and slicked his hair back, not noticing that his normal permanent bed-head was gone, his hair lying flat for once.

His aunt and uncle ran forward, and he pointed at them. "Them too," he told the snake. It chased after them, and he laughed even harder.

"Now be free! Be free, my pretties!" All the glass in the reptile house vanished, and a bunch more snakes fled at his command.

Chuckling darkly, he ran off. His rage had been replaced with a soaring happiness, which was something of an alien sensation to Harry. He ran, and ran; he didn't care where to, he just no longer gave a damn.

He was on a bus downtown when something inside him shifted, and Sardonic Harry was replaced with Just Harry. Gone was the happiness, even the rage. Now there was only fear and anxiety. What the bloody hell had he DONE? Was he out of his bloody MIND? Never mind the glass disappearing, or the snakes taking orders from him, he had run off. Run off, with nowhere to go except back to an aunt and uncle who would be angrier than they'd been in their entire lives.

Getting off the bus, he sat down on a bench and ran his fingers through his hair, which was no longer lying flat, and had gone back to permanent bed-head. But he was too terrified to notice something so trivial.

 _Okay, okay, let's not panic,_ Motherly Harry thought. _Panic isn't going to help. We have to think. What will happen if we go back to the Dursley's?_

"I'll get locked in my cupboard until the heat death of the universe, and won't get food."

 _Yes, and if we just... don't?_

"Still no food, unless I get some out of a garbage or I beg for money or something."

"Now why would you need to do that?" asked a stranger standing feet from him. He jumped, and looked up. Then his mind boggled. Before him was a man who looked like a very tall and thin Father Christmas, and was dressed in the most ridiculous pin-striped Zoot Suit with a big floppy sun-hat that didn't match.

Harry felt Sardonic Harry return. "What's it to you?"

The stranger blinked at him, surprised. Harry stared back. "Listen, if you're going to kidnap me, well... whether I cooperate or not depends on how what you plan to do with me compares to what I already go through with my relatives. I won't be a sex slave or anyth-"

"Oh now, boy, such language!" The way he said it made Harry think. Sardonic Harry left again, and Just Harry returned.

"Sorry about that, sir," he said in his best meek, passive voice. "I'm just a little keyed up."

"Natural, after what happened." The man looked around a bit before continuing, "Vanished some glass and set a snake on your relatives, correct?"

"How did you—I mean, er..."

Blue eyes twinkled gaily. "Don't worry, my dear lad." He sat down next to Harry on the bench, close enough to whisper but not _too_ close.

"Harry," he began.

"How did you know-"

"Please let me explain."

Harry nodded.

"My name is Albus Dumbledore. And, Harry, I shall just be blunt with it: you are a wizard."

He stared at the man. "What?"

"I said, you are a wizard. You possess magic."

His eyes narrowed in suspicion, Harry asked, "What of it?"

"Well, as it happens, so am I."

"Right, sure you are."

He looked around, then took out a long piece of worked wood, and waved it about a bit.

"Yeah, nothing happened," Harry said.

"Nothing happened that you _saw_ , Harry. That was not a demonstration, just preparation, as we are among Muggles – non-magic folk. Here, now, is the demonstration."

Albus Dumbledore pointed his wand at a stone, and the stone turned into a turtle, which walked toward them slowly.

"Okay, you're a wizard too. Doesn't explain why you're here talking to me."

"Well, Harry, I just so happen to be the headmaster of a school of magic, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. When the Ministry of Magic informed me of your rather impressive display of magic back at the zoo, and that they had not found the wizard responsible – though they knew who you were, I came looking for you."

"Oh. Did I break some secrecy law, sir? Am I going to go to prison?"

"No no, nothing like that. Harry, you are young, and do not have a wand, and you were raised by Muggles. So it is forgiven. Doing magic in front of Muggles is not a crime until you have started going to school, and even then there is some leeway."

"Oh. Good. So... er... what happens to me now? If I go back to the Dursleys, they'll lock me in my cupboard and not feed me for a month! And my relatives turn white and beat me if I so much as talk about anything that might be magic, they'll never let me go to this Hogwarts, sir."

Dumbledore looked in some concern at the boy. But the boy was telling the truth, not exaggerating. He scratched his beard to give himself time to think.

"Be that as it may, Harry, they cannot prevent you from going. Even if they will not pay for it, there is a fund to pay for those who cannot afford it. But because your parents were well-off when they died, that fund will not be necessary."

"Pardon?"

"Oh, Hagrid will explain it to you in more depth. I shall have him come round to collect you to go shopping later in the year, as the letters have not gone out yet."

"Please, sir, I can't go back to the Dursleys! I'm not exaggerating, they beat me and starve me and work me like a slave all hours of the day! I can't-"

"Calm down, Harry, I believe you."

"You do?"

"Yes. It makes me very... displeased... that I so misjudged your aunt and uncle. I put you with them because I thought you would be safe there. But I see now that was a mistake." He looked at the boy sadly. The images coming from Harry's mind, and the terror in his eyes, decided Albus.

"No, you shall not have to go back. You shall become a ward of Hogwarts instead, and I shall protect you. You have already suffered much damage, much more than I had feared in my worst imaginings. No, I already let one boy like yourself down. I cannot let it happen again."

"What did I need protecting from, as a baby? I mean, my parents died in a car crash. What's gonna hap-"

"Harry, your parents did not die in a car crash. They were murdered."

It was difficult, but over the next few minutes, Dumbledore explained how Voldemort, the most evil dark wizard in a century had murdered his parents, and for reasons unknown had been unable to murder Harry. How the man had lost his powers, become a wraith, when he tried. That because of this, he was famous; famous for being the cause of Voldemort's downfall, and famous for surviving the Killing Curse, something nobody else had ever done before or since.

"Anyway, Harry. Given that the Dursleys cannot be trusted with you, and given that I do not yet have accommodations for you at Hogwarts, I shall take you to the Leaky Cauldron, and get you a room there. I will have Hagrid be your guard. Come, take my arm, we shall Apparate there."

Harry still wasn't sure if he trusted this man, but took the man's arm anyway. Immediately, he felt like he was being squeezed through a rubber tube. When he reappeared, inside a dingy old tavern, Dumbledore quickly conjured a bucket for him to puke into, then vanished the mess with his wand.

After Dumbledore got him set up in a room, he paid for a meal for Harry, then left to go fetch Hagrid. Harry thanked the man before he left, and chowed down on beef stew, trying very hard to ignore the eyes staring at him.

That night, he went to sleep in an actual bed, feeling better than he had his whole life.

The next morning, Harry kept his eyes closed for several minutes, convinced it had all been a dream. But when he opened his eyes at last, he found he was in the bed he'd gone to sleep in. Once he was dressed and ready, he went down looking for breakfast.

"Um... I don't have any money, but, well, I can pay you later."

"No, my dear boy," the wizened old toothless owner said, grinning. "Hagrid already took care of it. And I'd gladly have given it to you on the house, but Hagrid insisted."

"Oh. Which one is Hagrid?"

"He's asleep himself at the mo. But- oh, there he is. Hello, Hagrid!"

Harry saw at once why Hagrid was his bodyguard; the man was too big to be allowed. But for all he looked intimidating, the man was a teddy bear in personality, complete with twinkling button-like eyes.

"Harry! I ain't seen you since you was a baby! C'mere," he said, giving Harry a bone-crushing hug. "Yeh look jes like yer Da. But wif yer mum's eyes."

Harry beamed, feeling ecstatic. As he did, Hagrid looked down at him and looked confused.

"Well, at leas I _thought_ yeh had yer mum's eyes. Look more like James's eyes, now. And yer hair... coulda sworn it was black when I came in. Now it's like a dark auburn. Ah well, trick o' the light, I'm sure. Anyways, even though the lists ent gone out yet, Dumbledore gave me a copy of one anyways, we can get yer stuff."

When they finished breakfast, Hagrid showed him how to get into Diagon Alley. Of course, Harry didn't have a wand yet to do it, but that would change soon. The brick wall opened up and he saw the most amazing place ever in his life. He became so excited that he began jumping up and down. Neither one of them noticed that Harry's hair and eyes were changing color and texture as he bounced, his bed-head hair becoming slick and normal, and turning redder; his eyes were also hazel now. But then he calmed down a bit and they went back to normal.

First they went to Gringott's, the wizarding bank, and got Harry's money, making another stop on the way at a vault that looked empty but for a small grubby package. When they got to Harry's parents' vault, Harry gaped. He had so much gold he probably could have bought his uncle's business, Grunnings, and still had plenty leftover. Sardonic Harry thought that idea was very amusing.

When they were done, Hagrid went back to the Leaky Cauldron for a drink, because the Gringotts carts made him ill. So Harry took his money around looking for the things on his list. The first thing he wanted was a wand, so he went to Ollivander's.

Ollivander's was an experience. The proprietor was a little creepy, and looked like he'd evaporate in a stiff wind. Then Harry spent the next half an hour or more trying every wand in the shop before one finally chose him. And on top of all that, he found out that his wand shared a core with the wizard that had murdered his parents.

Hagrid met up with him as he left Ollivander's, having bought Harry a beautiful snowy owl, and they went around getting the rest of his things, before returning to the Leaky Cauldron for the night.

Harry spent the whole summer reading his fascinating books, exploring Diagon Alley, and eating meals with Hagrid. And, occasionally, doing magic, since Dumbledore had said he wouldn't get in trouble for it until he started school. So it was that he had gotten pretty good at some of the spells they would be expected to learn his first year there, which he hoped would reflect well on his grades.

Some mornings, he woke up feeling weird, though; he didn't know why, and it always passed by the time he got to the bathroom, so he didn't say anything to anyone about it. But he bought a blank journal at Flourish and Blotts, one that could only be opened by the owner, and anything written in it would look like nonsense to anyone but the person writing in it. He bought it so he could describe the odd feeling before it passed.

He thought a moment, then began to write. The weird sensation was like his skin felt different, softer. His hands felt slimmer yet not skinny – more like slim in a healthy way, and more elegant. And one time, he'd fell groin-first on part of the bed and while it had hurt, it didn't hurt the way he'd expected. It hadn't hurt as much, or for as long, but still hurt. But when it happened again later, it hurt a lot more, threatening to make him cry. He made a mental note to avoid that part of the bed in future.

By the time September rolled around, Harry was starting to bore, and was glad school would be starting. He got all his stuff packed, and Hagrid took him to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, through the wall that was actually a doorway or something of the sort, where he spent some time wandering around talking to people, once he'd gotten his stuff in the train. One group he talked to was a group of red-heads, the Weasleys, whose mother was very nice.

At last, he got on the train and found a compartment, where he was shortly joined by the youngest Weasley boy – Ron, who claimed everywhere else was full. Harry didn't mind; maybe he could get a friend out of this. He'd never been allowed friends before, and now there was nobody to stop him.

"Oh wow, that's weird," Ron said after sitting down. "I thought your hair was black, before. But it's kind of red, now."

"Yeah, Hagrid's noticed that on occasion too. Says it's a trick of the light. As far as I know, it's always been black."

Ron narrowed his eyes in concentration. "Oh, yeah. It's black now. Odd. Oh well."

He and Ron had a lot of fun, once the trolley went by, trading Chocolate Frog cards and trying different candies and other treats.

At one point, a bushy-haired girl came by asking about some boy's lost pet toad. The motherly part of Harry felt stirred with worry for the unknown boy's pet, and so he excused himself to help the girl look.

There it was again, that odd feeling, as he and Hermione Granger looked for Neville's lost toad, but he barely noticed it, as he was too intent on finding the lost pet. They didn't find it, to his dismay, by the time they needed to go and change into their school robes.

When they got out, Hagrid directed the first years to a series of boats. Their stuff would go up without them while they did. Ron and Harry got a boat together, and Neville finally found his toad before they took off.

He soon saw why they approached the castle this way; it offered a very dramatic and beautiful view of the castle, that they got to enjoy for several minutes until they docked in an underground cavern, and headed up the stairs to the entrance hall.

"Ugh," said a voice behind him once they were left alone. "More Weasleys."

Harry turned around and saw a thin blond boy whose face, though better looking than Dudley's, nonetheless reminded Harry of his cousin. But when Harry looked at the boy, he looked confused.

"Oh, sorry. I thought you... well, your hair..."

"Great way to introduce yourself to new people, whoever you are."

"Er, sorry. Malfoy, Draco Malfoy."

Ron sniggered. Draco sneered back at him. He held his hand out to Harry.

"Harry Potter," he said, shaking the proffered hand with a sneer of his own. He was amused to note the blond boy's face become embarrassed.

"S-so it's true then? You really are Harry Potter?"

"Yes. Don't expect that to mean much to me, though. I only found out I'm famous over the summer. Still don't know what I think about it."

Draco then introduced him to Crabbe and Goyle. Harry looked down his nose at them both, but was otherwise polite. Ron seemed a little confused, but also amused, once he saw Harry's face.

A severe-looking woman, Professor McGonagall, came in then, and told them all about the sorting. Soon, they were being led into the Great Hall, to be Sorted before the whole school.

He looked at the sight before him. _**A grubby old hat on a bench**_ , Sardonic Harry thought. _**What's that all about?**_

 _Oh now, it's obviously a magic hat. Maybe we have to pull a rabbit from it?_

Harry snickered at that mental image. Ron looked at him curiously.

"Oh nothing," he explained. "Just a funny thought."

The hat sang a song about the characteristics of the different Houses; Griffindors were brave, Ravenclaws brilliant, Hufflepuffs were just and loyal, and Slytherins were cunning and sneaky. Sardonic Harry thought this was rubbish, just like the Zodiac he saw in the papers sometimes, but worse; they were going to live with a bunch of other people for 7 years based on this nonsense? It annoyed him. But at the same time, Motherly Harry was trying to decide between Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff.

Malfoy, of course, went to Slytherin, which confirmed some things for Harry. He waited, the thoughts in his head arguing with one another over the merits of the different Houses. Sardonic Harry even wanted to go to Slytherin, just to increase the quality of people there.

His different aspects were still fiercely debating when McGonagall called his name, and the entire school went silent as the grave for a moment, before chatter about him began. The inner voices of his thoughts went quiet, too.

Swallowing a lump, he walked up and sat down on the stool. The large hat was put on his head. Then, he heard another voice in his head, not one of his.

 _Interesting, interesting. You have a very peculiar mind, Mr. Potter. Oh well, nothing wrong with that. Just makes Sorting you a little more difficult. Let's see, you have courage, I see. And you're highly intelligent and studious as well. Also very kind and compassionate, and loyal. Oh, and cunning. There's ambition, as well. A thirst, to prove yourself. Hmm... now, where to put you?_

 _'Oh I don't know, Mr. Hat,' said Motherly Harry. 'But Slytherins sound like a bunch of icky bullying types.'_

 _ **Yeah,**_ said Sardonic Harry, _ **but maybe they just need a bit of straightening out. I think I could whip them into shape.**_

This went back and forth for a couple minutes, before the Hat interrupted.

 _Enough. I've heard from two Harries. But what about the third?_

 _Oh,_ thought Just Harry. _I would rather not go to Slytherin. I've put up with enough people like that in my life._

 _You sure? You could be great, you know. It's all here, inside your head, and Slytherin could help you achieve greatness._

 _No,_ Just Harry thought firmly.

 _Well if you're sure, better be_ "GRIFFINDOR!" the hat shouted out that last for all to hear.

 _ **Damn,**_ Sardonic Harry thought as he went to join the Griffindor table. _**Oh well. I might still be able to do something with them.**_

When the Sorting was over, the food appeared, and Harry began to eat. Having gotten used to larger and more frequent meals over the summer, he ate rather a lot more than he would have thought possible before the summer, chatting between bites.

After several minutes, he felt someone's eyes on him, and turned to look. There, a greasy-haired, sallow wizard with a hooked nose glared at him with intense loathing. Harry raised an eyebrow in confusion; how did this man hate him so, when he could not possibly know Harry yet.

Then something happened that had never happened before; his scar seared with pain, making him hiss audibly. But it passed just as quickly, and he was able to explain it away as a sudden muscle spasm.

He turned to one of the older Weasley boys, Percy. "Who's that man talking to the guy in the purple turban?"

"Oh, that's Professor Snape. He teaches potions. But everyone knows he's after Quirrell's job. Sorry, Quirrell is the one with the turban. That's new. Wonder when he got that?"

Harry thanked Percy, and went back to eating. Snape looked away, which was good, because he felt Sardonic Harry getting annoyed enough to glare back at the man.

That night, he fell asleep full to bursting, for the first time in his life.

.

 _ **There really needs to be some kind of tour of the school or something, before classes start,**_ Harry's sardonic side thought angrily as he and Ron struggled to find Transfiguration in time. They got in, thinking they were on time, only to find the teacher had been transformed into a cat. She changed herself back and glared at them.

"You're late, boys."

"Yeah, well," Harry said, annoyance filling him, "maybe if there was a Grand Tour, or a day to just explore before classes started, or something of the sort, we'd actually know where the heck we were going."

She frowned at him.

"Professor," he added as an afterthought. He suddenly felt worried he'd overstepped his bounds. Ron, too, was looking at him like he was mad.

"You have a point, Potter. But I'm taking that point from Griffindor for your cheek. Be glad it wasn't more. Now sit, we have class."

Thankfully, the rest of the class went much better. Harry redeemed himself in McGonagall's eyes by being able to change a toothpick into a needle on his first attempt, which got him 10 points for Griffindor, and an annoyed look from Hermione.

'I had months of practice,' he mouthed at her from across the room. The look on her face at that told him she wanted to hear that story later. So he did, at dinner later that day.

The rest of the week went pretty well, but then at the end of it was Potions, with Snape. They all filed in, and only when they were all seated did Snape practically glide in, like a very solid looking ghost, his robes billowing despite there being no wind.

 _ **Wee, Snape's a fairy,**_ thought Sardonic Harry. Only years of practice kept him from snickering aloud at this thought. Still, Snape glared at him as though he'd heard the remark, but couldn't prove it.

Looking away from Harry, Snape went into this speech about how beautiful potions were, like he was in love with the subject. Harry ignored his sardonic side suggesting Snape marry his cauldron, and wrote down everything the man said.

Obviously looking for an excuse to pick on Harry, Snape 'mistook' his studiousness for indolence, and suggested that Harry was too good to pay attention.

A thought crossed his mind, a tactic he'd done with his relatives on occasion, so he tried it.

"I was taking notes, sir. Your words begged to be written down."

The look on Snape's face made Sardonic Harry think, _**Yeah, he's looking for reasons to pick on us alright.**_

"Think you're so smart, do you, Potter? Then tell me, what would I get if I mixed powdered root of asphodel with an infusion of wormwood?"

 _Oh, I remember this one!_ Motherly Harry thought. "A powerful sleeping potion called the Draught of Living Death, Professor."

Snape's frown deepened. "Lucky guess. Where would you look if I asked you to find me a bezoar?"

Ignoring Hermione's outstretched hand waving in the air, he said, "I... hmm... oh wait, I remember now. The stomach of a goat. A bezoar is a stone found in a goat's stomach, that will save you from most poisons."

"Did you swallow the Potions book, Potter?"

"No, sir. I just got my books at the beginning of summer, and had a lot of time to read, and not much else, Professor."

Snape pounded the desk, his teeth grinding. "What is the difference between Monkshood and Wolfsbane?"

"Trick question, sir. They're the same plant; also known as aconite. Professor."

"FIVE POINTS, Potter. Five points from Griffindor!"

Harry frowned, feeling angry. But it wasn't Sardonic Harry anger. "May I ask why, Professor?"

"Because... because I said so, that's why."

"You need a reason to take points, sir. 'Because I said so' is not a valid reason."

"FINE! Then it's for your cheek, Potter. Any more and it will be detention."

"You can't just goad someone in order to have a retroactive excuse to take points, Professor. It's not fair."

"Life isn't fair, Potter! Life-" the man's face suddenly fell, and he turned pale as a ghost, backing up. Harry started to notice chatter, and looked around at Ron, to ask what was happening. But Ron's eyes were wide with shock; as were everyone else's. Ron gaped at him, pointing at his hair. Which, Harry finally noticed, was very long indeed. And bright red.

Taking a mirror out of his bag, he looked at his reflection. He... he had become a girl. His hair was bright red, his skin was paler, and his eyes were swiftly fading from bright green to hazel. Also, his glasses were missing, but he could see perfectly.

"Oh," he said. Only, it wasn't his voice. It was a girl's voice. "Well this is odd."

At those words, Snape fled the room without a word.

"You never told me you were a metamorphmagus!" Ron accused.

"A what?"

"You can change your appearance at will."

"No I can't. I didn't want to look like this. Why would I?"

He suddenly turned his head like he was in pain. When her head came back up, she looked around.

"Where's the teacher at? Oh wait, nevermind, I remember. Well what do we do now?"

Before anyone could answer, Dumbledore came into the room, and looked right at her.

"I see what you mean, Severus. Just like her, except for the eyes. James's eyes. A bit like a reverse Harry."

The girl that had been Harry waved and beamed at Dumbledore. "Hello, Professor Dumbledore. How're you?"

"I am well. What about you, Harry?"

"Harry? Oh no, I'm not Harry. He's listening, of course, but I'm Iliana."

"Iliana?"

"Yes. Iliana Evanna Potter."

"Well, Ms. Potter, would you please come with me to the Hospital Wing? We are naturally very curious to know what's going on."

"Okie dokie, Professor," Iliana said, grabbing her things with a smile. "See ya later, Ron, Hermione."

She stood up, and everyone noticed that her clothing had changed as well; she was wearing a girl's uniform.

Madame Pomfrey fussed over Iliana, doing tests, but ultimately looked at Dumbledore and shrugged. "Well, she's not a metamorphmagus, Albus; at least not of any kind I've ever heard of. She truly does not have any conscious control of the transformation. Which is, er... a complete transformation, if you get my drift. As to whether she'll change back, I have no idea."

"Oh I think I'll be able to change back, Madame Pomfrey. Unless Alastair shows up instead, which is possible."

"Alastair?" Dumbledore asked curiously.

"Yes. Al was the one who set all those snakes loose at the zoo, Professor. He didn't do it on purpose, of course. He got a bit caught up in his emotions, and got carried away."

"May I meet Alastair now?"

"That depends. I don't know how much control we have of the switch."

"Ah. So tell me, Iliana, do you know if Harry has been having any blackouts?"

"Not so far. This is the farthest one of our switches has gone, though; no telling what, if anything, has changed. But until now, we've all been co-aware, sharing a collective memory. But each of us adds a different flavor to the memories."

"I see."

The matron turned to Dumbledore. "Multiple personalities?"

"It would seem so, Poppy. Iliana?"

Iliana sighed. "Yes, Professor Dumbledore?"

"How did you come by your name?"

She looked thoughtful at that. "Hmm... well, I heard the names Iliana and Evanna at different points, and liked them. But I didn't string them together until, well... until I transformed."

"I see. And Alastair's name?"

"Oh, I gave it to him." She cocked her head for a moment, then smiled. "But he likes it. Alastair Potter. I read it in a book at the library. Alastair Crowley is who I got the name from."

"Ah yes, Alastair Crowley. I never met the man myself, of course. But he was rather infamous in the wizarding world at the time for wanting to abolish the statute of secrecy."

"Cool. Oh, by the way, I was wondering something."

"Yes?"

"Assuming I don't change back right away, will I have to go to the girl's dormitory?"

"Er, no. I don't think we should do that. If you went to bed Iliana and woke up Harry, that would be disruptive."

"Ah, okay."

"Still, I don't know if you should be in the boy's dormitory either."

"Well, I could always change in the bathroom, Professor."

"But would you feel comfortable there?"

She shrugged. "I know boys can be a bit gross, but if anyone tries anything, I can hex them."

Dumbledore chuckled. "Well okay, if you insist, Ms. Potter."

"Oh, one other thing, Professor."

"Yes?"

"Why did Professor Snape react so strongly to my appearance?"

"Well, Ms. Potter, you bear a striking resemblance to Lily Evans Potter, your mother, when she was your age. And he was, er... rather fond of her."

"Oh. Yeah, that would explain it."

He turned to the matron. "Poppy, will you be wanting to call in experts from St. Mungo's?"

"Yes, I think so. I'm curious to know what the, uh... the Potters are."

"Well, Ms. Potter, that seems all for now. Class is over with now, you should go to dinner."

"Thanks, Professor!"

Stepping into the Great Hall, the talking stopped suddenly, then kicked back up again as Iliana sat down next to Ron and began eating, explaining things to him, the twins, Hermione, and Percy between bites.

"Well okay," Ron said. "But it's gonna take some getting used to, my friend being two different people."

"Three. So far."

"Three?"

"Well we haven't fully transformed into Alastair yet, but we did a partial transformation at the beginning of summer. So eventually, he'll pop up."

The only other thing Ron had a problem with was he used the wrong pronouns once. After a talking-to from Iliana, during which she shouted for all the school to hear that she was 100% girl in this form, he learned his mistake and did not make it again.

Naturally, Dumbledore had to make a statement to the school about it. Iliana, embarrassed, hid her face while he explained that Harry was a Multiple, and what that meant. Even including a bit where he said the three personalities they knew of might not be the only ones.

She looked up at the teacher's table. Snape was not up there. _I guess he's still upset._

 _Naturally_ _,_ Harry said in her mind.

 _Ah, there you are. I was beginning to wonder. You ready to come back?_

 _I would, but I don't know how, yet._

 _Okay. Well don't worry about it too much._

She finished up, grabbed her things, and paused before leaving. "Harry says Hi, Ron."

"Oh. Er. Say hi back, then."

"Will do. Seeya." She took off for Griffindor Tower.

Going to bed was... interesting. She didn't have any suitable sleepwear, just Harry's boy sleepwear. She shrugged; it would have to do. She changed in the bathroom, into the scratchy pajamas which Harry had bought over the summer for himself. She was going to have to find a way to order her own pajamas. Of course, the other problem was her uniform; if she transformed back to Harry in her sleep, his uniform might still be a girl's uniform. Lucky he had spares.

She went to bed before any of the boys could come up, closing the curtains and spelling them solid first.

Iliana did not change back to Harry, or change into Alaistair, for the next few weeks. It was interesting going to classes she'd gone to as Harry before; she had different skills than he did. She didn't know how he was at potions yet, but she was poor in transfiguration, almost as poor as Ron. She supposed Harry's practice over the summer hadn't carried over to her.

Experts from St. Mungo's came in during the week and did tests on her for several days before finally declaring that whatever she was, she was something completely without precedent, as far as they knew. They were going to do more research, but Iliana thought they were probably wasting their time. But it was theirs to waste, so she said nothing.

About the only thing constructive they'd told her was why she was still in this form. She had apparently used up whatever kind of magic was fueling the transformations, and it had to replenish itself before she could transform again. Though one did offer the hypothesis that powerful emotions might be able to fuel a new transformation ahead of schedule. They also seemed to be agreed that it was possible that the changes were like a muscle, that with enough work it would get easier and the magic powering it would replenish itself faster.

So it was that when the Griffindors and Slytherins had flying lessons together, Iliana was still Iliana.

The morning before, there was almost an altercation when Draco grabbed Neville's Remembrall, a device to help people remember things. Just as Iliana and Ron had jumped up to defend the timid boy, McGonagall showed up and prevented any trouble.

Later, Iliana, Ron, and Hermione walked with the other Griffindors to flying lessons. Their teacher was Madame Hooch, who looked rather like a human hawk. She gave them instructions, and then set them to trying to follow.

"Up!" Iliana said, and the broom shot into her hand. Neville's didn't even move, and Hermione's only rolled around. Ron's hit him in the face, but caused no damage, and thus was very funny.

When everyone got on their brooms, she gave them instructions to lean forward gently then touch back down. She counted down, but before she got all the way through it, Neville – who was very nervous – accidentally pushed off prematurely and too hard, thus he went rocketing up into the sky, and flew around at random a bit as she yelled at him, before falling down on his wrist with a crack.

"Not a single broom in the air while I take Mr. Longbottom to the Hospital Wing. If I see anyone breaking that command, I will have them expelled."

When she left, Draco – smirking as he did – went over to pick up Neville's dropped Remembrall.

"Give it here, Draco."

"No, I don't think so."

"Please?"

"No," he said, getting on his broom and taking off. "I think I'll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find."

Without thinking, she jumped on her own broom. Ignoring Hermione's moralizing, she flew up after him. Her every worry and care vanished, and she felt such joy at the sensation. She'd found something effortless, something she knew how to do without learning.

Draco seemed shocked at her ability.

"Now give it back, Draco."

"No."

"Crabbe and Goyle aren't here to help you," she said. "And I can hex you. Be a shame if you fell out of the sky because I put you in a full body bind."

Draco turned even paler at that, but then sneered. "Have it then, if you can catch it." With that, he threw it as hard as he could in the other direction.

Again not thinking, she rocketed after it, and caught it after a 50 foot dive. Ecstatic, she flew back to the cheering Griffindors, and landed.

"MISS POTTER!" the stern voice of Professor McGonagall shouted, sounding shocked.

A sinking feeling in her gut, Iliana turned round to face the teacher. "Sorry, Professor, but Draco took-"

"I don't want to hear it, Ms. Potter. You could have DIED. Come with me. Leave the broom here."

She dropped the broom, but held onto the Remembrall.

"Good, yes, you should keep that for now, Ms. Potter; it's evidence."

Iliana worried the whole time they walked, silently, to wherever the professor was taking her. That was a bit of a turnaround, as she was usually the one telling Harry to calm down. She wished she had her own voice to tell her that.

They finally got to Quirrell's room, where McGonagall asked for Wood.

 _Wood? Is she going to beat us?_

But Wood turned out to be an older – and very handsome – boy. A boy that looked confused.

"Ms. Potter, this is Oliver Wood. He's the captain of the Quidditch team. Wood, I've found you a seeker!"

His eyes lit up, as he looked at Iliana as though sizing her up. "Really? You sure?"

"She caught that thing after a 50 foot dive, without a scratch on her. Charlie Weasley couldn't have done it."

"She has the perfect build for a seeker, too. We'll have to train her up. You ever play Quidditch before?"

"N-no, I haven't. Ron's told me and Harry about it, though."

"Oh, you know Harry Potter? Wait, Ms. Potter... are you his sister?"

"No, Oliver. Don't you remember, Potter is a Multiple."

"Oh yes, I remember you telling me now. Iliana, was it? Come to the Quidditch Pitch this Saturday and we'll start your training."

McGonagall turned to her and added, "I'd better not hear about you slacking off on your training, Ms. Potter, or I might change my mind about punishing you. Which I would hate to do, since it would be expelling three students at once, two of whom did nothing wrong."

The next day, a Saturday, Iliana went to the Quidditch pitch as instructed, and met Oliver Wood there. She blushed as she saw him, for she was very taken with the boy. Harry and Alastair came more to the front to help her shake that off and concentrate, but their transformation magic hadn't replenished itself, so nothing else happened.

Wood ran her through the basics of the game, then had her practice catching golf balls instead of risking the snitch, which she was very good at. They did that until it began getting dark.

"Well, that was excellent. Keep up the good work, and that cup will have our name on it," he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. She felt her face turn hot at the touch, and her vision went blurry for a moment.

"You okay, Iliana? I thought I saw something in your eyes."

"Oh, I'm fine." But she refused to talk all the rest of the way up the castle and into the common room. She went over to Ron and Hermione and told them all about practice.

Sunday went much the same, Wood wanting more practice, this time with a practice snitch. But they didn't practice as long, so she'd have time to do schoolwork. Which she had a hard time concentrating on, as thoughts of Wood kept invading her mind. Those thoughts didn't go away as she lay in bed, either, which made getting to sleep difficult.

The next day was again much like normal, until Iliana passed Wood in the hall. With Ron and Hermione there to witness it, her hair retracted into her head and turned black and wild; her height dropped an inch, and her eyes turned green. And then Harry's glasses returned. He also felt a pain in his crotch as the panties Iliana had been wearing took a little too long to transform into briefs, and squeezed him painfully enough that he cried out.

"Harry! You're back!" Ron cried out, hugging his friend.

"Yes. And before you ask, I remember everything that happened. We seem to have a collective memory."

"Welcome back, Harry," Hermione said. "You were gone for so very long!"

He shrugged. "Yeah, I know."

"Oh crap," Ron exclaimed.

"What?"

"Well, I suppose it's only Monday. But you might want to change back to Iliana before Saturday's practice, or Oliver will do his nut."

"I guess we'll just have to see what happens. I can't control it, after all. Besides, I don't think I'll have any problem on Saturday, even if I stay me."

.

Harry had a problem. It was Saturday, and it was Quidditch practice. Which, as it turned out, he was horrible at. He only caught the golf balls one out of ten times, and ended up spraining his ankle on a bad dismount, and had to go to the Hospital Wing to get it healed.

"Well," he later told Ron and Hermione, "Wood isn't happy. And neither am I. I suck at Quidditch." He then proceeded to give them a blow-by-blow description of how awful he was at it. They were a very good audience.

"Cheer up, mate. You'll change back at some point. Iliana's good enough she could probably miss every practice between now and the match, and still win. But I wouldn't recommend it, Wood might well lose his mind from the stress."

Ron got up to go to the bathroom at that point, and Hermione scooted closer.

"So," she said, sounding sly. "I noticed Wood passed by us, and y-Iliana turned beet red, and then there you were, Harry. I think she fancies Wood."

"I do not!" Harry said, his voice shifting into Iliana briefly, eyes flashing hazel before returning to green.

"Er, I mean... god, this is confusing. It's Iliana's feelings, but I feel them when she does, we're connected in some way that isn't quite telepathy, but close; we can read each other's moods, and send messages to one another, but we also have some privacy from one another, which I suppose is where the bulk of the difference between us lies – that ability to be distinct. Yet there's also some thoughts shared unintentionally, sometimes. It's all so weird, and trying to sort out who's saying what and who's feeling what is confusing. Her feelings feel like mine, but different. Gah..." He ran his hands through his hair, exasperated.

Hermione patted his arm. "Don't worry, you'll find a way to manage. And I can help. Or try to, anyway."

"Thanks, Hermione. We appreciate it."


	2. A Little Problem

The Many Faces of Harry Potter

By = Fayanora

Note: There is at least one small part that is mostly lifted word for word from the canon books. I try not to do that if I can help it, though, and it's only a very small part.

Chapter Two: A Little Problem

The next day, at breakfast, Draco Malfoy walked over to the Griffindor table where Harry was at and said, "Ah, the great Harry Potter returns at last. Good to see that insufferable redhead is gone for now. What's it like, Potter, having to pee sitting down?"

"I don't know, Malfoy," his voice harsher because Alastair was talking, even though they hadn't changed, "what's it like having to put your head over the toilet to poop?"

Malfoy glared as everyone else laughed. "Watch your tongue, Potter, if you like it where it is."

"Funny how much braver you are down on the ground, with your minions not far away," Al-Harry said cooly.

"I'll take you on anytime myself. Tonight, even. Wizard's duel, midnight. No contact, wands only."

"Sure, why not? Sounds like fun."

"Uh yeah, I'm his second," Ron said. "Who's yours?"

"Crabbe. So midnight's fine?"

"Well since high noon would be too conspicuous, midnight sounds like the next logical time."

Malfoy looked confused. Harry grunted.

"It's a Muggle cultural reference, of course you didn't get it."

Malfoy scoffed, but walked away.

"So I don't know what a wizard's duel is exactly, but I assume it's like a Muggle duel, but with wands instead of guns?"

"Er... I don't know."

"I imagine it is," said Hermione. "But you can't possibly go! Think of all the points you'll lose us if you get caught!"

Ron was about to speak, but Al-Harry interrupted. "Of course I'm not going, it's an obvious trap."

"Oh. Well, that's good. But why did you accept?"

"Because I'm going to alert McGonagall that Malfoy might be out, just in case he really does plan to show up."

"Why not Filch?"

"Because the man hates students and doesn't seem to serve any purpose. Sure, he cleans, but doesn't seem to use magic to do it; I'm not sure he _can_ use magic. Which makes me wonder, why don't they have a janitor who can use magic? I wonder what Filch did to deserve having to work here with people he hates. Poor man."

"You're feeling bad for Filch?"

Al-Harry snorted. "If I couldn't do magic, using Muggle cleaning methods to clean at a school of magic is the last place I'd want to be. I'd be a grouchy, spiteful, nasty git too if I had to do that."

Harry's eyes shifted to hazel, his hair reddening, and said, "Al, you're already a grouchy git."

Ron shook his head. "That is going to take so long to get used to."

"You're telling us," Harry said.

"Anyway, you think Filch is a squib?"

"No idea what that word means."

"It means he's a non-wizard born to wizarding parents. The opposite of a muggleborn."

"Maybe. I've never seen him use magic, other than potions. Not that I care, I just don't get why he's working here as a janitor when he can't do magic. Isn't there something else he could do? Something that doesn't anger him so much?"

Al-Harry shook their head, and sighed, going back to their work.

Harry ended up heading toward the common room early from dinner that night, but he made it no further than the library before he got dizzy and leaned against the wall. His head began to hurt, but before he could do more than moan a little, his hair became long and brown and straight, he felt his eyes changing, and he shrunk by at least a foot. Then, where Harry had been standing, was a little girl no older than 6, her skin brown enough to pass as bi-racial. She grinned, took out a mirror to look at herself, interested by having one green eye and one blue eye, then sneaked off.

Running into nobody else by some miracle, she followed some Slytherins to their common room, somehow also getting in without being seen. She hid behind a chair and pointed her wand at Draco, whispering incantations. Nothing appeared to happen, but she wasn't expecting anything to yet, anyway. She'd come up with the plan when Harry had been reading the other day, but hadn't known who she was going to target until Draco started being a git earlier that day. The plan involved a time-release spell, so of course it wouldn't look like anything had happened. But tomorrow, it would.

Her task complete, the little girl left the common room by just walking as though she belonged there. She was still dressed in a Hogwarts uniform, so doubtless people who saw her just thought she was a very short firstie. However it worked, she got out without a problem and skipped back to Griffindor's common room, going inside with a group of chattering first-years.

Going upstairs to Harry's room, she saw Ron changing, and wolf-whistled. His reaction was very funny, so she giggled as she watched him flailing about in a panic.

"YOU! You're a girl! You're not supposed to be here!"

"Sure I am. I live here."

Ron spluttered. "No you don't!"

"Sure I do." She held her hand out. "Hi, I'm Zoey Potter."

Ron groaned. "Another one? How many people are in there, anyway?"

"Only four that I know of. But the others didn't know about me, so I could be wrong."

Ron looked at her closer. "You don't look like either Harry or Iliana."

She shrugged. "So?"

"Just seems odd, is all."

"Well I do have one green eye and one blue eye. And though he hasn't shown up yet, I think Al has blue eyes, so I'm similar in that way."

"Blue, green, _and_ hazel?"

She shrugged. "It's magic."

"Point. I suppose you're going to sleep in Harry's bed?"

"Yup."

She went over to Harry's trunk and pulled out one of Dudley's old t-shirts, a really old one that wouldn't be _too_ huge on her. Without any warning at all, she pulled her robes off, and Ron jerked his head away.

"Oy! Anyone could see you!"

"I'm six."

"Yes, I had noticed. What's your point?"

"I'm _six_."

Ron shook his head, giving up. "Is it safe to look?"

"Sure," she said.

He turned and peeked, and saw her mooning him. "OY!"

She giggled. "What? Never seen a six year old's butt before?"

Ron peeked again, and – seeing she was decent at last – went past her and back downstairs.

"Where you going, Ron?"

"To see if I can find Hermione."

"Oh goody! I'll come too!"

As he went down the stairs, she slid down the banister and landed barefoot on the floor before him. She shouted "Hermione!" Eyes turned her direction and stared at this small child in their common room.

Luckily, Hermione was still downstairs. She looked at Zoey curiously. Zoey walked up to her, bowed with a flourish, and announced with mock pomposity, "Greetings, Hermione Jean Granger. I am Zoey Potter."

Hermione looked at Ron questioningly. He shrugged.

"Well hi there, Zoey," Hermione said. "Welcome to Hogwarts."

"Thank you."

With that, she ran off upstairs, and everyone still in the common room started talking about the strangeness of Harry Potter in low mutters. Ron sat down next to Hermione, even though he was already in his PJ's, and put his head in his arms on the table.

"There, there, Ron, we'll get used to it eventually."

Zoey was still around the next day, of course. She changed into her robes right there in front of Ron, Seamus, and Dean, and again their reactions were very funny to her. She hurried to get ready, and practically dragged Ron to breakfast.

"Oy, what's the rush?"

"We should sit where we can watch the Slytherin table, something very funny is going to happen. Hey Hermione, you should come with us!"

"Why, what's going to happen?"

"It's a secret. Oh, we should slow down so Filch doesn't get upset."

They waited there, eating, for Malfoy to show up, trying to get the girl to speak, but she refused. When they finally saw Malfoy, nothing looked odd about him, but Zoey began to giggle.

"What are you-"

"Just watch him."

They did. For a couple minutes, nothing happened. They were tempted to stop looking, but then they noticed something happen. Before their eyes, his hair turned bubblegum pink and went from sleek and slicked back to poking out everywhere worse than Harry's hair.

They burst into laughter. Within minutes, the laughter had spread, and Draco was looking confused. Then someone showed him what he looked like, and he screamed and ran out of the room.

The laughter was still going when Fred and George showed up.

"So who did that? Because that was bloody brilliant."

"I think Zoey here did," Ron said, indicating the young girl.

"Oh yeah, we heard about you last night. Fred Weasley," Fred said, holding out his hand.

"And I'm George. Always glad to meet a fellow trouble maker."

She took both their hands at once and giggled. "Thanks. Ah, I wonder how Ms. Pomfrey will try to deal with it. I've covered all the counters I know about. One will make his hair turn into snakes, another will turn his hair into seaweed. And a third will make all his hair fall out. It'll take a full day to grow back if that happens."

"Wow. How does a first year become such a genius?"

"Oh, lots of reading. I may have been in hiding, but I was pulling strings from within, to get the others to read certain things, and then I compiled the information inside and worked it out. But now I'm out, I can read whatever I want, whenever I want to. So this is just the beginning."

"As funny as that was, Zoey," Hermione said, "that was very mean. I should tell McGonagall on you."

Zoey shrugged. "What're they gonna do to me? I'm too adorable and young to punish too much. And if they decide otherwise, I'll just vanish. It would be unfair to punish the others for something I did. Anyway, Hermione, don't you want to know why I did it?"

Hermione sighed. "Why did you do it?"

"Because Malfoy tried luring us into a trap. Al saw right through it, but still, he tried. So I got him back."

Hermione shook her head disapprovingly, but said nothing else.

Draco Malfoy wasn't seen all that day. From rumors they heard, his hair had undergone two disturbing transformations before falling out, when Madam Pomfrey tried fixing it, and she couldn't get it to regrow.

"I can't stand it," Zoey said that night in the common room. "I need a picture. I'll be right back."

"Where are-"

Suddenly, Harry stood there, bemused. "What's going-"

Before he could finish his sentence, Harry vanished again, and Zoey was back, holding a camera. Ron and Hermione were so shocked by this that Zoey was out the door before they snapped out of it. They immediately ran after her, as it was almost curfew, and in their haste left the portrait open.

She had been fast; they scoured the corridors for her, even down in the dungeons. They didn't find her until she was running away from several angry Slytherins, laughing like a maniac as they chased her. Hastily, Ron and Hermione ran to keep up with the girl.

"What'd you do?"

"Got a photo of Malfoy bald! For some reason the Slytherins didn't appreciate it."

"Gee, I wonder why?"

On their way back, they ran into Peeves the Poltergeist. The colorful little man grinned maliciously at them, rubbing his hands together. "Oooh, students. It's past curfew now, ickle firsties. Should tell Filch, I should."

"Please don't! We're on our way back now."

"Hmm... do I or don't I? Decisions, decisions..."

"Shove it, Peeves!" shouted Ron. Hermione and Zoey both groaned.

"STUDENTS OUT OF BED! STUDENTS OUT OF BED DOWN THE CHARMS CORRIDOR!" he shouted, Ron's rudeness having decided him.

"Come," Hermione said, grabbing them both and running away.

They got lost trying to get away, and ran into a dark corridor.

"Where are we? I don't recognize this."

"Oh no! This is the third floor corridor! It's forbidden!"

They heard Filch coming, and looked around desperately. "Alohomora," Hermione incanted at the door. It unlocked, and she dragged them in.

Ron and Hermione's first sign of trouble was Zoey gleefully shouting "DOGGIE! Pretty poochy!"

"What? What do you-" Ron started, looking where Zoey was pointing.

"Pretty little Spot! Such a nice wittle doggy!" she said, as Ron poked Hermione to get her attention.

The two were looking up at an enormous, three headed dog, and despite what Zoey had said, it did not look nice at all. In fact, it was only the fact they'd surprised it that they hadn't been attacked. It was recovering from that, though, and growling at them, then barking. They screamed. Zoey jumped forward and hugged the giant dog's leg. It stopped barking and looked down at her in confusion. They took advantage of this confusion to grab Zoey and carry her off running down the corridors and into the common room, panting with the effort.

"Aww, no more pretty doggie," Zoey said sadly.

"UGH!" Hermione exclaimed. "That's it! I'm going to bed before either of you can try getting us killed again, or worse – expelled. Good night."

"She needs to sort out her priorities," Ron said, as Zoey giggled.

The next day, they talked about the experience of the night before, Hermione mentioning she'd seen it standing on a trap door, so it must be guarding something. They were still discussing what could be that valuable when the mail came and Zoey got a package, though it was addressed to Iliana.

"I know it's weird," she said to the confused-looking owl, "but you can give it to me. Iliana isn't available right now. I'll give it to her."

"She's right," said Ron.

Hooting in a resigned way, the owl gave Zoey the package.

"Gee, it's shaped like a broomstick," she said. "I wonder if it's that Underwear of the Month basket I ordered."

"Underwear of the Month?"

She giggled. "Yes, if something like that existed, I would subscribe for sure. But yeah, obviously a broom. Yup," she added, holding up a letter. "Says so here in this attached letter."

Ron read it; it was from McGonagall, instructing her not to open it at the table.

"Like I would anyway," she said. "It's not mine, is it? Anyway, wanna see the photo I got?"

She handed the two of them a copy each of a picture of Draco, bald, jumping in fright at the flash of the camera and running away, as the picture version of Zoey ran after him and dragged him back into the frame.

"Keep em. I have dozens. Oh, Fred, George, here, you can have copies too."

"Brilliant!"

They looked over at Draco, whose hair was back to normal now, but he was looking very embarrassed, and left breakfast early.

However, he did not go far. When they left the Great Hall, he was there with Crabbe and Goyle, all three of them looking livid.

"YOU!" he shouted, pointing at Zoey.

"Who me? Innocent little me?"

"Yes you, Potter. You give me those photos NOW!"

"I'd be glad to give you copies," she said, handing each one of them copies.

Crabbe did not manage to stifle his snort of amusement in time, and Draco glared daggers at him. Recovering quickly, Crabbe scowled at her. "Give us _all_ your copies now, or else."

"Oh, sorry, I've already given out a dozen copies today, and taught several people the copying spell. Maybe you shouldn't try to get other people in trouble by challenging them to midnight duels, in future, and we can call this first prank the last, whadda ya say?"

"Why you little..." he paused, looking at the package in her hand. "Oh you're in for it now, Potter! That's a broomstick, and first years aren't allowed their own brooms."

"Special exception for Iliana, seeing as she's the new Griffindor Seeker."

Before Draco could answer, Professor Flitwick appeared at his elbow.

"Not arguing, I hope, students?" he squeaked.

"Potter's been sent a broomstick, Professor," said Malfoy quickly.

"Yes, yes, that's right," said Professor Flitwick, beaming at Harry. "Professor McGonagall told me all about the special circumstances, Potter. And what model is it?"

"Dunno yet, Iliana's not here right now, so she hasn't opened it. Wait, Ron, hold this for me," she said, thrusting the package into his arms.

"What? I-"

Zoey vanished, and a bemused Iliana stood there in her place. "What?"

"Oh there you are, Iliana. I think Zoey wants-"

"Zoey?" she looked confused.

"Zoey Potter. The newest member of your collective to appear. Anyway, this is yours, open it."

Still bemused, Iliana opened it. "A Nimbus 2000!" she exclaimed. Draco glared with jealousy.

"Ah yes, Potter, an excellent broom indeed. Use it well."

Flitwick and the three Slytherins left them then, Draco grumbling loudly. Iliana suddenly found herself thrusting the broom into Ron's arms again. And with that, Zoey returned.

Ron blinked at her as she took the broom back. "Are you guys getting better at that, or is that just you who can do that?"

"No idea. Come on, I need to put this away before we go to class."

"What's the betting the only two girls in their collective are both good at Quidditch?" Ron wondered aloud at Hermione. Hermione shrugged.

"I don't know. But I can't imagine Wood will be pleased if only Iliana can play Quidditch."

"Nah, it'll be fine. You saw for yourself, twice now she switched on purpose to someone else and back again. When it's time to play Quidditch, if she sucks at it, she can just switch. There won't be a problem."

There was a problem. Zoey was slightly better at Quidditch than the boys in the collective, but not by much. She flew well enough, but couldn't catch anything, and almost fell off her broom once in the attempt. And as it turned out, Zoey could only leave on a whim, and all attempts to switch on purpose were futile. Wood was in tears, pulling his hair out. The first match was only two weeks away, and Iliana had only had one practice session.

The next week's practice went no better, and by the end of it, Wood was screaming at Zoey. Despite not having been scared of Fluffy, Zoey reacted to his screaming much as any six year old would, and burst into genuine tears. This did not stop Wood from yelling; in fact, he screamed even louder.

Fred and George began stepping forward to defend her, when she fell to her knees and jerked in a way Ron and Hermione had come to recognize; it didn't surprise either of them that when she stood back up, she transformed. What _did_ surprise them, though, was that there seemed to be two members of the Potter collective shouting in unison at Wood, and as a result, their transformation was still in flux, fighting between the two influences.

"AND NOFFER TINNNN," they said, making so little sense that they paused and looked confused. "Whavatfra? GAH!"

They fell over, and the transformation settled; they were now stuck as a mix of two people. Both eyes were a strange mix of hazel and blue, their hair was a mix of red and black, some of it short and some long, some of it smooth and some of it sticking out. Their skin was splotchy; pale in places and tan in others. One hand was masculine with slightly thicker fingers than the other, which was thin and feminine. And one leg was several inches shorter than the other, which is why they'd fallen over; and the shock of the incomplete change made them pass out.

When they woke up later in the hospital wing, they looked no different. Their face glared up at their friends, angry and confused.

"What the bloody hell happened?" they said in Al's harsh voice.

"Ah so you're awake, then, Mr. and Ms. Potter," the matron said. "Good."

"What?" they asked, sounding more like Iliana. "What was that?"

"Well best as I can tell, two of you tried taking over at the same time, and it resulted in a rather messy hybrid transformation. I didn't dare do anything to try to fix it, because to be honest, as a likely unique case, I have no idea what to do, and I'm afraid anything I do could damage you all permanently. So it was safest to do nothing, and hope you can sort yourselves out."

"Great," said Al. "Now I look like some kind of mutant. Just bloody wonderful. Malfoy is gonna laugh his arse off."

"And that's not all," Iliana said. "I can't feel Harry."

"I can," Al responded. "But he's not even a little in control, at the moment. It's just the two of us as pilot and co-pilot, for now."

Ron shook his head and sighed, then glared at Wood. Wood ignored Ron, and turned to Alastair and Iliana. "So does that mean you'll be able to practice?"

"Ugh..." the two said in unison.

"I'm issuing you a crutch," the matron said, "to adjust for the one leg being shorter than the other. It's on your wand-arm side, though, which will make things difficult. I suggest you try using your wand with your left hand until this passes."

They nodded, closing their eyes, and silently wished they could be normal.

As the weeks wore on, and the weird looks increased, at least they could console themselves that with Iliana co-piloting, they were good at Quidditch, so Wood was happy about that. On the ground, they were awkward and clumsy in their hybrid body, but in the air they were every bit as graceful as ever.

On Halloween, they woke up to delicious smells of baking pastries and limped on their crutch down to breakfast, glad that they had the Halloween feast to look forward to. It also helped Al's mood that co-piloting with Iliana was a lot like being tutored in the things she was good at, including the levitation spell in Charms.

Ron was doing it wrong; Iliana was tempted to tell him how to do it right, but Al growled at her when she suggested it, so she didn't. Instead, Hermione corrected him on the right way to pronounce the incantation. Al's bad mood must have spilled over to Ron, because Ron snapped at her. And later, as they were leaving class, Ron sniped something nasty about Hermione at Al and Iliana, which Hermione overheard, sending her away crying.

"Smooth move, jackass," Al sniped at Ron. "Now you've made her cry. You and Wood should form a club, call it the We Make Girls Cry Club."

Ron did, at least, have the decency to look abashed about that. But he didn't go after Hermione.

They went to the feast and sat down. As they ate, they overheard news that Hermione was crying in the girl's bathroom. Ron looked guilty again, but his feelings of guilt did not slow down his stuffing his face. Which ended up being a good thing, because the feast got interrupted by Professor Quirrell running in and shouting about a troll in the dungeon before collapsing.

Everyone burst into panicked screaming, until Dumbledore got their attention with some crackers from his wand.

"Prefects," he said, "lead your Houses back to the dormitories immediately!"

As they followed Percy, Al and Iliana's face looked confused. "What? Dormitories? The troll is in the dungeons. Don't the Slytherins and Hufflepuffs have their dormitories down in the dungeons?"

"Er... that's a very good question. I think you're right."

"Hermione!" Iliana shouted.

"What about her?"

"She doesn't know about the troll! We have to help her!"

 _ **Wait, shouldn't we just tell-**_

"Come on!" she said, ignoring Al, pulling Ron along. As they ran to find Hermione, they didn't notice that they'd left the crutch behind, and neither did they notice that the Potter body's hybrid appearance had changed, and now Iliana was running in her own body, the strange hybidization having become reversed.

"Percy!" Iliana exclaimed, hiding her and Ron behind a gargoyle. But it wasn't Percy, it was Snape.  
"Well that's odd. What's he doing down here instead of being with the other teachers?"

"No idea."

"He's heading up to the third floor. Why?"

"Hey, what's that smell?"

Iliana sniffed. "Eew," she said. It was like old socks and an uncleaned public restroom of the foulest sort. It was the troll.

"Come on."

They ran forward as it walked into a room, and Iliana made them hide again.

"What? We should close the door on it, trap it!"

"Ron you dunderhead, that's the girl's restroom it just walked into. Hopefully it'll look around and head back out, finding nothing interest-"

Hermione screamed. "Damn," Iliana said, jumping out and whistling loudly. The troll didn't notice this at first, so she whistled louder. Ron joined in by screaming at it, and then Iliana fired sparks at it. This finally got the beast's attention, and it turned and lumbered in their direction.

"You keep distracting it, I'll extract Hermione."

Ron nodded, continuing his attention-seeking, and Iliana ducked inside and pulled a terrified Hermione out and past the troll. Then she grabbed Ron's hand and they took off running, where they ran right into Professor McGonagall.

"Troll's back there! We barely got Hermione out of the restroom before it killed her!"

McGonagall nodded. "You three, back to Griffindor dormitories. We'll take care of the troll."

But they were already halfway down the corridor before she'd finished speaking, and before long they were slamming the portrait shut and collapsing into chairs in the common room, panting like they'd run a marathon.

"Well that was a close shave," Ron said.

With the icy chill of November, it was Quidditch season, and Wood was thrilled that Iliana was still hanging around for practices. Their first match, Griffindor versus Slytherin, was coming up, and everyone was excited about it.

One afternoon, they took advantage of some of the last nice weather for the season to sit outside in the sun, Hermione helping the situation with a little portable magical fire in a jam jar. Iliana was reading _Quiddith Through The Ages_ , a library book, when they saw Snape limping past. Since they weren't sure the porable fire was allowed, they hid it, but their guilty looks got Snape's attention, and he confiscated the book on the excuse that library books weren't allowed outside.

"Odd, I wonder why he's limping?"

"I dunno, but I hope it's really hurting him."

That evening, everyone was getting keyed up for the match, especially Iliana. She wanted her book back, to distract herself, so she went out to try to ask Snape for it back. She went down to the staffroom, which was flanked by a pair of gargoyles, but they didn't do anything but watch her as she knocked. There was no answer, so she knocked again.

"Is Professor Snape in there?" she asked the gargoyles.

"Should we tell her?"

"I don't see why not. Yes, he is."

"Thank you."

She knocked again. Still no response. So she opened the door, before the gargoyles could warn her not to, and saw Filch examining a bite on Snape's leg.

"Blasted thing," Snape was saying. "How are you supposed to keep your eyes on all three heads at once?"

Iliana tried to close the door quietly, but Snape looked up and right into her eyes. He turned pale at first, then glared.

"I just wondered if I could have my book back."

"GET OUT! OUT!"

Iliana ran off before he could take points off. She was halfway back when she had to lean against the wall.

"No, not now!"

She shrank, her hair changed color, and suddenly Zoey was there. Zoey walked back toward the staffroom, and went right in. Nobody was in there anymore. She looked around, found her book, and grabbed it, then headed back.

When she came through the portrait hole, Ron saw her and groaned. "Your timing sucks, you know."

"Oh, don't worry," Zoey said, putting the book on the table. "Iliana was having a Snape problem, so I came along to solve it. I'll be going now."

"When you say you solved it-" he started, but she wasn't there anymore; Iliana was back.

"Did Zoey murder Snape?" Ron asked. "Because if you need to go on the run from the Ministry, I'd be willing to help."

"Thanks, but no. I saw Filch helping Snape bandage a bad bite on his leg when I went into the staffroom, and he screamed at me to get out. I was heading back when Zoey took over, went back, and barged right in for the book. Luckily, nobody was in there that time. Anyway, from what Snape said before he noticed me, he tried getting past that three headed dog on Halloween, and got bitten."

"What, d'ya reckon he tried stealing whatever it was guarding?"

"Yeah, why else would he be trying to get past it? He probably let the troll in, too, as a diversion."

"I really doubt that, Iliana. He's a teacher."

"Hermione," Iliana said, "teachers are people. They can be thieves just as easily as anyone else."

That night, Iliana tried to figure out what the dog was guarding, which kept her up rather later than she would have liked, given that their first Quidditch match was in the morning.

The next morning was pleasant weather for Quidditch, if a bit cold. Iliana was so nervous she had a hard time eating any breakfast. Seamus had perhaps the least helpful advice, to eat because seekers get clobbered the most by opposing teams, but his heart was in the right place.

Her stomach was still full of metaphorical rocks when they went out to the pitch to get changed. Her friends were in the stands holding a sign saying 'Potter for President,' which made her giggle, wondering how many wizard-born people were confused by the sign.

"Okay, men and women," Wood said. "This is it."

"The one we've been waiting for," George said melodramatically.

"We have Oliver's speech memorized," Fred explained.

"Shut up. We're going to win, everyone, I can feel it. Good luck, all of you."

"Yeah, and if you lose, Oliver will pretend you don't exist."

"Hush. Now, let's go play some Quidditch!"

They ran out, now in their Quidditch robes, and got into position in the air. Madam Hooch called for a fair game, her sights on the Slytherins, before she released the balls, and the game began.

Iliana flew around, looking for the snitch, listening to Lee Jordan's commentary along the way, giggling in places, but her focus on finding the snitch. Wood's plan, after all, was for her to stay out of the way until she saw it, so she would be less likely to be attacked.

There! She saw it! She pelted after it, but Marcus Flint blocked her on purpose, a foul that cost her the snitch. She went back to looking for it, annoyed that Slytherin felt they needed to cheat to win.

She was still looking minutes later when her broom jerked, starling a yelp out of her. Then it happened again, and again. Her broom was bucking around like a wild stallion trying to throw her off, which had her screaming and clutching the broom, getting the attention of everyone who could hear her.

As if a bucking broom wasn't problem enough, she felt her body trying to change to Zoey, and could finally sense the younger girl's thoughts; she, too, was screaming. Giant three headed dogs, no problem; but apparently Zoey feared falling. They both hung on tight, hoping the bucking would stop soon.

"Someone's jinxing Iliana's broom!" Ron exclaimed.

Hermione looked around with her binoculars, and saw Snape staring at Iliana, skin white as a ghost, muttering something under his breath. She gave the binoculars to Ron and ran off, sneaking over under the bleachers, and lit Snape's robes on fire. Once he noticed he was on fire and tried putting it out, he broke eye contact and fell against Professor Quirrell behind him.

The broom had stopped bucking, so Iliana composed herself quickly and sped toward the ground. In a flash, she was on the ground on all fours, choking. She spit something out, which turned out to be the snitch.

"Eew," she said, thinking about the germs that must be on it. "I've got the snitch!" she shouted, holding it aloft.

Once people figured out what had happened, cheering erupted, and people joked about how she'd nearly swallowed it.

Given how she'd nearly fallen off her broom, and then nearly swallowed the snitch, she was soon at Hagrid's hut getting some tea.

"It was Snape," Ron was explaining, "Hermione and I saw him. He was cursing your broomstick, muttering, he wouldn't take his eyes off you."

"Rubbish," said Hagrid, who hadn't heard a word of what had gone on next to him in the stands. "Why would Snape do somethin' like that?"

Iliana, Ron, and Hermione looked at one another, wondering what to tell him. Iliana decided on the truth.

"I found out something about him," she told Hagrid. "He tried to get past that three-headed dog on Halloween. It bit him. We think he was trying to steal whatever it's guarding."

Hagrid dropped the teapot.

"How do you know about Fluffy?" he asked.

"Fluffy?"

"Yeah — he's mine — bought him off a Greek chappie I met in the pub las' year — I lent him to Dumbledore to guard the —"

"Yes?" asked Iliana eagerly.

"Now, don't ask me anymore," said Hagrid gruffly. "That's top secret, that is."

"But Snape's trying to steal it."

"Rubbish," said Hagrid again. "Snape's a Hogwarts teacher, he'd do nothin' of the sort."

"So why did he just try and kill Iliana?" cried Hermione.

The afternoon's events certainly seemed to have changed her mind about Snape.

"I know a jinx when I see one, Hagrid, I've read all about them! You've got to keep eye contact, and Snape wasn't blinking at all, I saw him!"

"I'm tellin' yeh, yer wrong!" said Hagrid hotly. "I don' know why Iliana's broom acted like that, but Snape wouldn' try an' kill a student! Now, listen to me, all three of yeh — yer meddlin' in things that don' concern yeh. It's dangerous. You forget that dog, an' you forget what it's guardin', that's between Professor Dumbledore an' Nicolas Flamel —"

"Aha!" said Iliana, "so there's someone called Nicolas Flamel involved, is there?"

Hagrid looked furious with himself.

"Enough. I'm not sayin another word, any of yeh."

Iliana jerked, becoming Zoey. Hagrid looked at her bemusedly.

"Ello there," he said. "Who're you now?"

"I'm Zoey Potter. I saw Fluffy the other day. He's _gorgeous_!"

Hagrid beamed. "Yeh like im, do yeh?"

"Pretty puppy!"

"Puppy?" Ron said, incredulous. "I hope not. If that's him as a puppy, I'd hate to see him fully grown."

Hagrid and Zoey spent the next hour discussing the kinds of creatures Hagrid was most fascinated by, but sadly Zoey did not get anything else out of him about what the dog was guarding. Then again, it was hard to tell if she was even trying to do that.

With just half an hour left til they had to go back inside, Zoey got dizzy, and leaned against the table.

"Wha's tha matter?" Hagrid asked in concern.

She jerked, shouting, and the shout changed from that of a little girl to that of an older boy. She shot up in height until she was a couple feet taller than Harry, her hair went black again but got shorter and smooth, her one hazel eye went blue to match the other one, and suddenly a very handsome 14 year old boy was sitting there, everyone staring at him in shock. Like Zoey and Iliana, he didn't wear glasses either.

He glared, which somehow seemed to enhance his looks rather than detracting.

"Sirius?" Hagrid said in shock.

"What'd you call me?"

"Er, sorry. Nothin."

Hermione sighed. "Are you Alastair?"

He nodded, still scowling. "Yes. Alastair Potter. And I've been seething silently inside for the past hour. How can you defend Snape, Hagrid? The man is an abusive arse who shouldn't be teaching children, and now it looks like he might be a thief and an attempted murderer."

"I'm sayin nothin, Al. Dumbledore trusts him, and that's good enough for me."

"Yeah, I'm really gonna value the opinion of someone who put me with child abusers for 10 years. Granted, he did say he misjudged them, and I'm going to become a ward of Hogwart's, unless he's forgotten his promise. Still, his judgment of people has been wrong before, so I don't have your faith in him, Hagrid. I'm open minded; maybe he's innocent. But I'm not going to go to the other extreme and trust him just because Dumbledore says he's good people."

Hagrid looked thoughtful at that, if a little sad. "Well tha's yer right, o' course. I understand, I do. But I trust Snape. And I trust Dumbledore. He trusted me, got me this job after I was expelled."

"Ah, I see. You owe him. Well I won't say anything else, then. There'd be no point."

Alastair didn't leave after Hagrid, which of course led to more introductions and even more odd looks, seeing as he was a full three years older than anyone in their year. Harry Potter was also now known to be four different people, and people had begun taking bets on the likelihood of still more to come.

Meanwhile, it was plain from Al's grouchy and sarcastic attitude where Harry got that side of his personality from. Al always had a smart-ass response to everything, even if he didn't always share it. But he wasn't all grump all the time, thankfully; he did laugh and joke amiably at times, with a laugh like a bark, which got weird reactions from the teachers.

The teachers were, in fact, the people who gave Al the weirdest looks of all. The looks were best described as an odd mix of pleased nostalgia, fear, sadness, and anger. And whenever he spoke, they got even stranger. He tried asking McGonagall about it once, and she turned white and quickly changed the subject, so Al decided not to ask anyone else about it.

What was more, when Snape saw him for the first time, he set a new high mark for fury in his face that Al hadn't thought possible. Snape was actually so livid that he couldn't speak, and spent all of the class time pointedly avoiding looking in Al's direction.

Despite all that, he found there were benefits as well. Older students, girls mostly but also some boys, would stare at him like lovesick puppies, swooning and/or giggling as he walked by. It had made him annoyed at first, but as the weeks wore on, he began to enjoy it, soaking up the attention like a drug while simultaneously pretending he didn't notice.

Al was, unsurprisingly, horrible at Quidditch. Unlike the others, who could at least fly reasonably well, Al was even more prone to airborne accidents than Neville was, and actually broke both arms one Saturday afternoon, so Wood reluctantly decided that until Iliana came back, Al would stay firmly on the ground. Why Iliana was the only one in the collective to have that particular talent, nobody knew.

In fact, he was very clumsy on the ground as well. Whether this was from the transformation having thrown off his sense of his body or was just how he was, nobody knew. But he found himself apologizing for knocking stuff over almost as much as he was making sarcastic comments, most days.

He, Ron, and Hermione were going to the library a lot lately, looking for Nicolas Flamel. He was a hard person to find, though; they must have gone through half the books in the library by Christmas looking for him.

Draco Malfoy tried teasing him about staying in Hogwart's for Christmas, but he wasn't bothered. As long as he didn't have to see the Dursleys again, he was fine. Besides, Ron and his brothers were staying behind, too, because their parents were going to Romania to visit Charlie.

Hermione made them promise to keep looking for Flamel before she left for home.

"Yeah yeah, we know," Al said, not looking up from his book.

"Hey Hermione, you could ask your parents about Flamel, that should be safe."

"Very safe, seeing as they're both dentists."

"Dentists?"

"Doctors who specialize in fixing teeth," Al explained.

"Oh. Why do they do that?"

"What, specialize?"

"Yeah."

"Because Muggle medicine is very complex and difficult to learn. It takes people eight or more years of university to become a general practitioner, and more time, I think, to specialize. Specialists are needed because there's too much knowledge about medicine for anyone to know everything. So for anything more complicated than easy fixes, you get foot specialists, nose and throat specialists, cancer specialists, and so on."

"Dentists don't need _that_ much education, Al," Hermione corrected. "They're not like other specialists, since they don't need to know all that other medicine just to fix teeth."

"I stand corrected."

"Oh god," Ron said, scooting away from some other students. "More of those giggling fourth-year girls."

Al leaned back in his chair, smiling easily. "Eh, you're just jealous."

"Not really. It's a little creepy, since you're actually 11, no matter how old you look."

Al shrugged. "Whatever."

"Even more so when you add that there's a six year old girl in your collective."

"Yeah okay; point taken, Ron."

On Christmas eve, Al was reading again, but stopped, looking bored.

"Well, this is boring. And I wouldn't want Harry to miss out on his first decent Christmas. So I'll see you around, carrot-top."

"What did you call-"

But Al was gone, and Harry was back, sighing. "Sorry about him."

Ron shrugged. "It's okay."

On boxing day, Harry woke up without much excitement, but that all changed when he saw he'd gotten actual presents from Ron, Hermione, and Mrs. Weasley. It seemed Ron had told her Harry wasn't expecting any presents.

"Sorry I only got you one thing," Ron said. "I'd love to give each of you stuff, but y'know, we don't have much money."

"Hey that's fine, I wasn't expecting any presents at all, and even if I had, I wouldn't expect anyone to give each of us presents. If the others want something, they can buy it with the money my parents left me."

He went through more of his presents, and found a wooden flute from Hagrid, which looked handmade. There was also a mysterious package from someone who didn't give their name. The note said that it had belonged to Harry's father. He opened it up, and felt something that felt like water woven into fabric.

"Bloody hell!" Ron exclaimed. "I wonder if that's... yes, it is! Put it on!"

Bemused, Harry put it on, and saw his body disappear.

"Invisibility cloak?" Harry guessed.

"Yeah, exactly. Those are really rare, and really valuable."

Harry frowned, thinking. But his thoughts were interrupted by footsteps up the stairs, so he hid the cloak. Before long, he was dragged downstairs by the twins, for a day of Christmas fun and feasting, his first proper Christmas.

That night, as he lay in bed, Ron asleep, Harry sat thinking. After a while, he came to a decision, and got up, grabbed the cloak, and headed out into the corridors to sneak around the school.

Not knowing where else to go, he tried the library, sneaking into the restricted section to look for Flamel. He instead grabbed a screaming book, dropped the lantern in fright, and took off before Filch could find him. After some close calls, he ducked into an empty classroom and turned around, startled to see a very large mirror.

It was huge, and magnificent, and it had an inscription around it that looked to be in another language.

 _ **That's not another language, though,**_ said Al in his head.

 _What is it, then?_ He asked silently, in case someone heard him.

 _ **It's English, written backwards. It says "I show not your face but your heart's desire."**_

Harry squinted at it, trying to read it backwards. Sure enough, that's what it said, backwards and in disjointed words in an attempt to disguise the fact.

Curious, he took off the cloak and stepped closer to examine it. Suddenly, his reflection changed to show Iliana standing there, and all around her were dozens of people. One of the two closest, just behind him, looked very much like Iliana, but with Harry's green eyes. His mother, then. And the other looked like him, only older, and with Iliana's hazel eyes. So that was James, his father. The others had to be other family members, then.

He stared at this. He wondered why it showed Iliana instead of himself, but had no answer, so he just stood there staring at them, until a sudden noise made him realize he was hiding from Filch. He threw the cloak over himself again and left.

The next day, he was like a man posessed; all he could think of was the mirror, and after telling Ron about it, he said he'd show it to Ron. The day seemed to crawl by at a snail's pace as he waited for nightfall.

That night, he and Ron went out under the invisibility cloak, Harry struggling to find the place again. But finally they found it. He stood in front of it, and once more saw Iliana and his family surrounding her.

"I don't see anything," Ron complained.

"Oh, well, maybe you have to stand here to see it."

"Alright," Ron said, stepping into place.

"See them? See my family, and Iliana?"

"Wow! I see me! And I look great. Head boy, Quidditch captain, and I'm holding the Quidditch cup! Do you think this mirror shows the future?"

"No," Harry said, feeling Al speaking through him. "The inscription is backwards English, it says it shows you your heart's desire. So I want to see my family, that makes sense. And you want to outshine the rest of your brothers, that also makes sense. The only part I don't understand is why it shows me Iliana, rather than me.

"Anyway, what's so interesting about something achievable like that? This is the only time I've seen my family, let me have it again."

"No, you had your turn!"

A sudden noise outside froze them, and Harry hastily threw the cloak over both of them just before Filch's cat, Mrs. Norris, came in the room. They didn't dare breathe as she looked around in confusion, not letting their breath go until she left the room. They waited a few heartbeats before heading back to their dorms.

He had a hard time sleeping again that night, with the mirror on his mind, and that sleeplessness haunted him all day long in the form of exhaustion. Despite that, though, he went back again the next night, on his own again.

Throwing the cloak aside casually, he went right to staring into the mirror.

"Back again, Harry?" a familiar voice asked.

His insides froze, and he looked to the voice's owner, Albus Dumbledore. He must have walked right by the man in his haste to get to the mirror.

"Professor. Er, I didn't see you."

"Funny, how nearsighted being invisible can make you," he said with a twinkle in his eyes, walking over to where Harry was.

"So," said Dumbledore, slipping off the desk to sit on the floor with Harry, "you, like hundreds before you, have discovered the delights of the Mirror of Erised."

"Oh, is that what it's called?"

"Yes. And of course, you know what it does."

" 'I show not your face, but your heart's desire,'" Harry quoted.

"Indeed. Your Alastair aspect is quite astute, to have spotted that little trick so quickly. Some people stare at the mirror for years never realizing the inscription is actually English. Of course, there is more to the mirror than just that."

"Oh?"

"Yes. While the mirror shows us neither truth nor wisdom, and while many have wasted their lives away, going mad trying to sort out if what they saw was possible, the happiest man on Earth could look into it and see only himself, just as he is."

Al snorted audibly, Harry's eyes flashing blue. "I doubt any such person exists. But if they did, I think I grasp your meaning. It shows you what you most want, the deepest and most desperate desires of our hearts."

"Precisely."

"So why does it show me Iliana, rather than myself?"

"Hmm... that, my boy, you'll have to figure out for yourself. I do not feel qualified to offer suggestions on that. Anyway, Harry, the mirror will be moved to a new home, tomorrow, and since it has the unfortunate tendency to drive people insane, I ask you not look for it again. However, if you should come across it in the future, you should be prepared for it now."

 _ **Well that's an odd statement. Does he expect that's likely? And does this have anything to do with the thing hidden in the castle right now? Whatever the hell that is...**_

Harry nodded, ignoring Al's internal comment. "Yes, sir. I promise I won't go looking for it again."

"Good. I'll hold you to that. For now, though, I shall be lenient with you. I did, after all, give you your father's cloak, so I'm not terribly surprised you used it."

"You had it?"

"Yes. He loaned it to me before going into hiding, which is why it's not been... well..." he trailed off.

"Blown up, you mean?"

"Er, yes. That. Anyway, I think it's time you go back to bed, don't you think?"

"Sir — Professor Dumbledore? Can I ask you something?"

"Obviously, you've just done so," Dumbledore smiled. "You may ask me one more thing, however."

 _ **Smart ass,**_ Al commented.

 _Takes one to know one,_ Harry replied.

"What do you see when you look in the mirror?" he asked aloud.

"I? I see myself holding a pair of thick, woolen socks."

 _ **Uh-huh. Sure you do.**_

Harry raised an eyebrow.

"One can never have enough socks," said Dumbledore. "Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books."

"Okay. Well I'll be going back to bed now, sir."

"Of course, my dear boy."

Harry put the cloak back on, and went back. When he slipped back into bed, he thought about Dumbledore's answer, which had obviously been a lie.

 _ **Well what did you expect? That's a very personal question. For all you know, he could be gay, and he sees himself being-**_

 _God, Alastair, if you finish that thought, I will scream. I don't need any horrible images in my mind, thank you very much._

 _ **Whatever.**_

Harry sighed, and rolled over, concentrating on trying to get to sleep.


	3. Flamel and Murphy and Norbert and Voldy

The Many Faces of Harry Potter

By = Fayanora

Note: Thanks, everyone who reviewed, I feel giddy from the praise! Sorry this chapter has been so long coming. Hope you enjoy!

Note two: I know this chapter follows the canon material a lot, I'm sorry for that, but I did try to avoid it. It gets better, I promise.

Chapter Three: Flamel and Murphy and Norbert and Voldy

Harry took Dumbledore's advice and did not seek the Mirror of Erised again, but he had a hard time getting it out of his head. He felt sick from withdrawal, and even had to retreat within, which was useful because Iliana came out, which Wood was pleased about.

"You see, Dumbledore was right; that mirror could drive you mad!" Ron said, facing away from him, and so didn't notice Iliana switching; but he heard the small sound of the magic changing their shared body, and turned to look.

"Oh, hi Iliana."

"Hey Ron."

"Well it's a shame you didn't at least find out who Nicolas Flamel is," Hermione added.

"I wonder why Harry saw you, though, instead of himself? Isn't it supposed to work for whoever's in front of it?" Ron wondered aloud.

Iliana shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe it got confused, didn't know which of us it should work for. No way to test it again now, and I wouldn't try anyway. I never liked that mirror; it was creepy."

When the term started again, they went back to trying to find out who Flamel was in their spare time, Harry in the background of Iliana's mind, certain he'd heard the name before somewhere but unable to think of where.

At practices, which were getting more frequent and difficult, Iliana had gotten over her nerves around Wood. She still fancied him, but she'd gotten used to him being around, and so she was more comfortable around the older student.

During one particularly muddy practice, the Weasley twins messing about got Wood angry, and in his anger he revealed that Snape was refereeing their match with Hufflepuff, which was ominous. Of course, Iliana rushed back as soon as she could to tell Ron and Hermione about his sinister new desire to be a referee. She found Ron trouncing Hermione at chess, and though he had been concentrating on his next move, Ron caught onto Iliana's mood and let her speak.

"Don't play," said Hermione once Iliana finished.

"Say you're ill," said Ron.

"Pretend to break your leg," Hermione suggested.

" _Really_ break your leg," said Ron.

"I can't," said Iliana, flapping her hands with anxiety. "There isn't a reserve Seeker. If I back out, Gryffindor can't play at all."

 **I have an odd suggestion,** piped up Alastair from within.

 _What?_ Iliana asked him.

 **Have Zoey transform us if something happens, the magic of that might knock off the spell.**

 _Sounds iffy, but I guess we can put it on reserve._

"Where'd you go?" Ron asked when Iliana began to focus on the real world again.

"Well Alastair had this idea, that if Snape tries the same spell or something, Zoey could transform us; that might throw off the spell."

"Maybe..." Hermione said, sounding doubtful.

"Worth a shot, at least," Ron said.

Just then, Neville came in, hopping, from having been leg-locked by Malfoy. Since she liked Neville, she helped him with the countercurse and also tried to improve his self-esteem. Hermione and Ron joined in.

"Go to Professor McGonagall!" Hermione urged Neville. "Report him!"

Neville shook his head. "I don't want more trouble," he mumbled.

"Oh, I understand that perfectly, Neville. In primary school, Harry was bullied a lot. Other than running away, there wasn't a lot he could do."

"You've got to stand up to him, Neville!" said Ron. "He's used to walking all over people, but that's no reason to lie down in front of him and make it easier."

"There's no need to tell me I'm not brave enough to be in Gryffindor, Malfoy's already done that," Neville choked out.

Iliana grabbed a Chocolate Frog from her robes and gave it to him. "You're worth twelve of Malfoy, Neville. The Sorting Hat put you here, didn't it?"

"Yeah, and where's Malfoy?" Ron asked. "Stinking Slytherin, that's where."

"Ron, don't be prejudiced. Slytherin isn't all evil," Iliana chided. "And not all dark wizards were in Slytherin. Anyway, Neville, the fact you're in Griffindor means you ARE brave. Being brave isn't about being unafraid, it's about facing your fear."

"Thanks, Iliana. I feel better now. I'm gonna go to bed," Neville said. "You want the card? I know Harry collects them."

"Thanks, Neville," she said, taking the card.

As he walked off, she looked at the Chocolate Frog card he'd handed her. "Dumbledore again. He was the first one I—I mean we, ever... HEY!" She gasped. "I've found him! I've found Flamel!"

"What? Where?"

"Here, on Dumbledore's card. We told you we'd read the name somewhere before, Harry read it on the train coming here — listen to this: 'Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragon's blood, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel'!"

In response, Hermione took off excitedly and came back with an enormous book, which she slammed onto the table, making Iliana wince for the poor book's sake, and turned it frantically.

"I never thought to look in here!" she whispered excitedly. "I got this out of the library weeks ago for a bit of light reading."

" _Light_?" said Ron, but Hermione told him to be quiet until she'd looked something up, and started flicking frantically through the pages, muttering to herself.

"I knew it! I knew it!"

"Are we allowed to speak yet?" said Ron grumpily. Hermione ignored him.

"Nicolas Flamel," she whispered dramatically, "is the only known maker of the Philosopher's Stone!"

"What's that?" asked Iliana.

Hermione read aloud a section of the book, wherein it told that the Philosopher's Stone was a stone that could make people immortal and turn any metal into pure gold. It was plain to them all why Snape was trying to get it. Even _they_ thought it sounded good to have.

Iliana decided to play after all, she didn't want to give Snape a reason to declare Griffindor losers by default. That didn't stop her from being anxious and scared, though. Running into Snape in the halls repeatedly didn't help her nerves, either, especially with the strange look he kept giving her whenever he saw her.

The morning of the match, Iliana was so anxious that she felt sick. So sick that she almost considered going to the Hospital Wing. Her teammates had to almost drag her down to the pitch.

As if things couldn't be any worse, when she saw Snape, something snapped inside her, and suddenly Al found himself standing there.

"Shite," he said. "The universe hates us."

"Iliana, time to..." Wood began, trailing off when he saw Alastair. When he recovered his wits, he started screaming and yelling and pitching a fit, the Weasley twins had to hold him away from Al.

Finally getting calm again, Wood said, "Well, we'll have to play. I just hope we don't lose too badly," before storming off.

"Mate," said one of the twins, "I guess you didn't know Dumbledore is here today, in the stands."

"Well that's a relief. I just wish we'd known earlier. No idea how to switch back, and I can't imagine Zoey would be any help."

 **Iliana? You in there at all?**

 _Yes, I am._

 **Do you think you can take control, even if we can't switch?**

 _Yes, I think so._

"Well Iliana says she can take control, even though we're in this form. I just hope it works."

Al relaxed, feeling himself slip out of control of the body, even though he still felt the same feeling of being the one in the driver's seat. It was, to extend the metaphor, as though Iliana were grabbing the wheel from the passenger's side, only a little less awkward, and hopefully not as dangerous. But the fact that he nearly tripped on his own feet getting to the pitch did not bode well.

"Bollocks!" Ron cursed. "Hermione, look. It's Al."

"Oh my, what a time for them to switch."

Al/Iliana looked up into the bleachers and saw Dumbledore's silver beard. That was confirmation that they'd switched for no reason; not that Iliana had done it on purpose, of course. Only Zoey was able to switch on purpose, so far. Al tried to relax, thinking about nothing in particular to make it easier for Iliana to drive the body.

 _This is so weird,_ she said internally. _I can feel your... your thingy. And the other thingy that goes with it. How do you manage with those things in the way all the time?_

 **Dunno. I just do.**

Up in the bleachers, Ron watched Al get on Iliana's broom with apprehension. Al was a horrible flier, which made the situation worse for safety reasons as well as for their hopes of winning. But there was something off in Al's behavior; he was being clumsy on the ground, which Ron had never seen Al do before, and Al's face kept switching between looking spaced out and looking keenly around.

"Hey Weasley," Malfoy sneered at him. "How long do you think the Potter freaks will stay on their broom this time? Want to place a bet on it?"

Ron didn't answer; Snape had just awarded Hufflepuff a penalty because George Weasley had hit a Bludger at him. Hermione, who had all her fingers crossed in her lap, was squinting fixedly at Al, who was circling the game like a hawk, looking for the Snitch, even if he did wobble dangerously on his broom.

"You know how I think they choose people for the Gryffindor team?" said Malfoy loudly a few minutes later, as Snape awarded Hufflepuff another penalty for no reason at all. "It's people they feel sorry for. See, there's the Potter freak, who's got no parents and who's like a human nesting doll, then there's the Weasleys, who've got no money — you should be on the team, Longbottom, you've got no brains."

Neville went bright red but turned in his seat to face Malfoy.

"I'm worth twelve of you, Malfoy," he stammered.

Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle howled with laughter, but Ron, still not daring to take his eyes from the game, said, "You tell him, Neville."

"Longbottom, if brains were gold you'd be poorer than Weasley, and that's saying something."

Ron's nerves were already stretched to the breaking point with anxiety about Harry.

"I'm warning you, Malfoy — one more word —"

"Ron!" said Hermione suddenly, "Al!"

"What? Where?"

Al had gone into a spectacular nose dive, everyone on edge as he shot to the ground like a bullet. A bullet that began to glow as he reached for the snitch.

"He's changing again!"

Sure enough, while it was Alastair who had reached for the snitch, it was Iliana who grabbed it.

"You're in luck, Weasley, Potter's obviously spotted some money on the ground!" said Malfoy.

Ron snapped. Before Malfoy knew what was happening, Ron was on top of him, wrestling him to the ground. Neville hesitated, then clambered over the back of his seat to help.

"Stop fighting, please! Iliana won! They won! Griffindor won!" cajoled Hermione.

Iliana jumped off her broom with relief, a foot from the ground. Despite having been in Al's form, despite the difficulty of trying to drive a body that wasn't hers at the time, they had managed it. In less than five minutes, no less. And they had another piece of the mystery of their transformations figured out; intense emotions seemed to be a trigger for their switches. Switches that were getting easier, and had less resting time between them.

"Well done," said Dumbledore quietly, "glad to see you haven't been brooding over that mirror, been keeping busy. Excellent."

Iliana left the locker room alone later with her broom, ecstatic to have won. But as she passed the shed, she saw Snape heading toward the Forbidden Forest.

 _What's he up to?_ asked Harry.

"No idea," she said quietly aloud.

Getting back on her broom, she followed Snape without letting him see her, then flew over the forest looking for him. When she found him again, he was with Quirrell.

"… d-don't know why you wanted t-t-to meet here of all p-places, Severus …"

"Oh, I thought we'd keep this private," said Snape, his voice icy. "Students aren't supposed to know about the Philosopher's Stone, after all."

Iliana leaned forward. Quirrell was mumbling something. Snape interrupted him.

"Have you found out how to get past that beast of Hagrid's yet?"

"B-b-but Severus, I —"

"You don't want me as your enemy, Quirrell," said Snape, taking a step toward him.

"I-I don't know what you —"

"You know perfectly well what I mean."

An owl hooted loudly, and Iliana nearly fell out of the tree. She steadied herself in time to hear Snape say, "— your little bit of hocus-pocus. I'm waiting."

"B-but I d-d-don't —"

"Very well," Snape cut in. "We'll have another little chat soon, when you've had time to think things over and decided where your loyalties lie."

Snape stormed out of the clearing, and Iliana and the others felt their insides fill with cold dread.

When Iliana found Ron and Hermione, she pulled them into an empty room to tell them what she'd seen and overheard.

"So it _is_ the stone then? Well that's confirmed at least," Hermione said.

"Snape's using Quirrell to help him?" Ron said. "That's not good. That man has no spine, it'll be gone by the end of the week."

"Well let's hope he's braver than he looks."

Ron snorted. "And sounds. And acts."

Quirrell must have been braver than they thought, though, because in the following weeks, Fluffy was still there guarding the stone, whenever they checked.

In the excitement of that conversation, it was a couple weeks before Iliana remembered to tell her friends that she thought powerful emotions were a trigger for their transformations.

"Well that makes sense," Hermione said, thoughtful. "It's not wand magic, is it? It can't be, since it seems to be unprecedented. And wandless magic works best with intense emotions; fear, anger, grief, and the like.

They were in the library, having taken a momentary break from their studying for exams. Iliana was about to speak again when she spotted Hagrid in the library, looking furtive.

"Hagrid, what are you doing in the library?"

 **I imagine he's reading,** Alastair commented. **It's not like there's a buffet in the middle of the floor...**

Ignoring his smart-ass commentary, Iliana looked expectedly at Hagrid.

"Jus' lookin," he said shiftily, which got Ron's and Hermione's attention as well.

"You're not a very good liar, Hagrid," Iliana whispered kindly.

"An what're you lot up ter?" he asked her suspiciously. "Not still lookin fer Nicolas Flamel, are yeh?"

"Oh we figured that out ages ago," said Ron offhandedly. "And we wanted to know if Fluffy was guarding anything else besides the Philos-"

"SHHHH! Yeh lot en't supposed ter know bout tha. Yeh want me ter lose me job?"

"Of course not, Hagrid. We'll talk about it later, then."

"Right, sure. In me hut, nice 'n private there. Well, see you lot later."

"He was hiding something. Let's go see what he was looking at."

Nodding, the three of them went to where he'd been.

"Dragons!" Ron whispered. "Hagrid was looking up stuff about dragons! Look at these: Dragon Species of Great Britain and Ireland; From Egg to Inferno, A Dragon Keeper's Guide."

"Hagrid's always wanted a dragon, he told us so the first time I ever met him," said Iliana, mixing her pronouns up.

"But it's against our laws," said Ron. "Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks' Convention of 1709, everyone knows that. It's hard to stop Muggles from noticing us if we're keeping dragons in the back garden — anyway, you can't tame dragons, it's dangerous. You should see the burns Charlie's got off wild ones in Romania."

"But there aren't wild dragons in Britain?" said Iliana, horrified.

"Of course there are," said Ron. "Common Welsh Green and Hebridean Blacks. The Ministry of Magic has a job hushing them up, I can tell you. Our kind have to keep putting spells on Muggles who've spotted them, to make them forget."

"So what on earth's Hagrid up to?" said Hermione.

Later, they knocked on the door to Hagrid's hut, noticing that the curtains closed for some reason. When he let them in, the mystery deepened, as the inside of the hut was boiling hot. Iliana wilted into her seat, wishing she knew a spell to summon cool air. She barely noticed Hagrid making them tea and stoat sandwiches, and couldn't have had any with this heat even if Hagrid's cooking wasn't horrible.

Her mind so sleepy from the heat that she was like the living dead, Al decided to take over the body. He tried doing what she'd done during the last quidditch match, but found it too awkward. He couldn't exactly summon strong emotion at will either, so he just let her body lay there limp, while he took control of the speech center. It had to look odd, her just laying there and him talking with her voice, barely moving, but it worked, and that's what counted.

"We were wondering what's guarding the stone apart from Fluffy?" he said in a voice that sounded flat even to him; he tried to ignore the weirdness of hearing his words in Iliana's voice. Harder to ignore was the weird looks from Ron and Hermione.

"Can't tell yeh. Don't know meself, fer one. The stone was almost stolen outta Gringott's, I reckon yeh worked that much out. Dumbledore agreed to guard it. Beats me how yeh even know about Fluffy."

"It might help if you'd actually, you know, _locked the door_ keeping the giant monstrous mutt from everyone else. We accidentally went in running from Filch, barely got out with our lives."

Hagrid turned white. "Blimey, I don't understan. It _was_ locked, last I knew. Saw Dumbledore lock it meself."

"We only wondered who had _done_ the guarding, Hagrid," Hermione interrupted. "We wondered who else Dumbledore trusted besides you to guard it."

 **Heh, yeah; appeal to his pride; good one Hermione,** Al thought.

As predicted, Hagrid's chest swelled, and he beamed at them.

"Well, I don' s'pose it could hurt ter tell yeh that … let's see … he borrowed Fluffy from me … then some o' the teachers did enchantments … Professor Sprout — Professor Flitwick — Professor McGonagall —" he ticked them off on his fingers, "Professor Quirrell — an' Dumbledore himself did somethin', o' course. Hang on, I've forgotten someone. Oh yeah, Professor Snape."

" _Snape_?"

"Yeah — yer not still on abou' that, are yeh? Look, Snape helped protect the Stone, he's not about ter steal it."

"Because teachers are _always_ paragons of virtue and not human beings with flaws and foibles," Al sneered with Iliana's face.

"Al? Is that you?" Ron asked.

"Yeah. Iliana doesn't like the heat. She's here, but not here at the same time. Anyway Hagrid," he continued anxiously, "you're the only one who knows how to get past Fluffy, right? And you would never tell another soul as long as you live?"

"Not a soul knows except me an' Dumbledore," said Hagrid proudly.

"Well, that's something," Al muttered to the others. "Hagrid, can we have a window open? I'm boiling. Iliana is like a living corpse in this heat."

"Can't, Al, sorry." Hagrid said apologetically, glancing furtively at the fire. It took a lot of willpower, but Al managed to lift Iliana's head enough to look at it, too.

"Hagrid, what is that?" he asked, even though he already knew the answer. In the heart of the fire, under the kettle, was an enormous black egg.

"Oh yeah, that's, er..."

"Either you're making the world's largest hard boiled egg, or that's a dragon egg."

"Yeah, yer right Al. Dragon egg."

"Where did you get it, Hagrid?" said Ron, crouching over the fire to get a closer look at the egg. "It must've cost you a fortune."

"Won it," said Hagrid. "Las' night. I was down in the village havin' a few drinks an' got into a game o' cards with a stranger. Think he was quite glad ter get rid of it, ter be honest."

"Well that's just a tad too convenient," Al said scathingly. "Where'd _he_ get it, the five and dime store?"

"But what are you going to do with it when it's hatched?" said Hermione, as though Al hadn't spoken.

"Well, I've bin doin' some readin'," said Hagrid, pulling a large book from under his pillow. "Got this outta the library — Dragon Breeding for Pleasure and Profit — it's a bit outta date, o' course, but it's all in here. Keep the egg in the fire, 'cause their mothers breathe on 'em, see, an' when it hatches, feed it on a bucket o' brandy mixed with chicken blood every half hour. An' see here — how ter recognize diff'rent eggs — what I got there's a Norwegian Ridge-back. They're rare, them."

He looked very pleased with himself, but Hermione didn't.

"Hagrid, you live in a _wooden house_ ," she said.

"Not to mention they're illegal, you great lump," Al added. "Do you _want_ to go to prison?"

But Hagrid wasn't listening. He was humming merrily as he stoked the fire.

So now they had something else to worry about: what might happen to Hagrid if anyone found out he was hiding an illegal dragon in his hut.

"Wonder what it's like to have a peaceful life," Ron sighed, as they fanned Iliana outside of Hagrid's hut, in the cooler air. She finally started to come around, Al gratefully giving her back the driver's seat. Still, she wobbled a lot on her way back, and was still feeling ill that evening, as they continued studying for exams.

Then one day at breakfast, they received an owl from Hagrid. The note attached said simply _It's hatching._

"Honestly," Al said, bypassing Iliana's control in his annoyance, "it's a bloody miracle the thing isn't already gone. What is Dumbledore thinking? Hagrid is well intentioned, but he's like a small child, overexcitable and doesn't keep secrets well. Might as well tell a parrot your secrets!"

"Hey Al," Ron said in passing. "Anyway, Hermione, we should skip herbology and go down-"

"Shut it!" Al hissed angrily, annoying Iliana. "You two are almost as bad as Hagrid, airing your dirty laundry anywhere you- oh Hell!"

With a glow of bright light, Iliana's body became Al's. "Well that's just peachy," Al complained. "And here all I wanted was a nap, let Iliana drive. She's the better studier anyway. Hell, even Harry would be preferable."

"Where's Harry been lately, anyway?"

"No idea. He talks, internally, sometimes. But mostly I think he just watches. He seems to prefer Iliana to me, though. He complains more when I'm out."

 _I do not!_

 **Thus proving my point.**

 _Damn._

"Oh Merlin's saggy testicles," Al said, pointing at Draco with his head. The blond boy had stopped dead to listen.

 _And no doubt he heard just enough to know Hagrid is up to something. Which is literally the last thing we need right now. And for all your talk of being quiet, Al, you were the one who who spilled the beans._

 _ **I hate it when you're right, Harry.**_

Ron and Hermione gave Al significant looks. They'd seen Malfoy too.

His two friends continued arguing all through Herbology. He rolled his eyes at them, tempted to tell them to get a room, but deciding against it, given their ages. It was awkward enough looking like a fourth year in a class full of firsties without being creepy. Anyway, the two of them finally agreed to go down to Hagrid's during the morning break. As soon as Herbology was over, they practically ran to Hagrid's, Al checking behind them, paranoid that Malfoy would follow. They weren't exactly being inconspicuous, after all.

Al's suspicion turned out to be true, Malfoy was sneaking around. Al threw a few dozen hexes at Malfoy so fast that the blond boy could do nothing but run away in a zig-zag pattern. Despite being enemies, Al nodded at this behavior, impressed that Malfoy knew to do it. He made sure he saw Malfoy go inside before heading back to Hagrid's.

Hagrid greeted the three of them, flushed and excited. Al sat down, leaning back in his chair, his feet on the table, arms crossed. Hagrid paused to look at him, a strange mix of emotions crossing his face.

"Take a photo, it lasts longer," Al said, and Hagrid turned away.

The egg was lying on the table. There were deep cracks in it. Something was moving inside; a funny clicking noise was coming from it. Taking this as an ominous sign, Al changed position so he was sitting with the chair turned.

The others drew their chairs up to the table, and everyone watched with bated breath.

All at once there was a scraping noise and the egg split open. The baby dragon flopped onto the table. It wasn't exactly pretty; Al thought it looked like a crumpled, black umbrella. Its spiny wings were huge compared to its skinny jet body, it had a long snout with wide nostrils, the stubs of horns and bulging, orange eyes.

It sneezed. A couple of sparks flew out of its snout.

"Isn't he beautiful?" Hagrid murmured. He reached out a hand to stroke the dragon's head. It snapped at his fingers, showing pointed fangs.

"How d'ya know it's a he, Hagrid?" Al asked casually. "It's a fire-breathing lizard, they don't have their junk hanging out like mammals do; you have to be a herpetologist to know how to sex them. Could be a girl for all you know."

Hagrid shrugged. "He feels like a 'he' ter me."

"Whatever."

"Bless him, look, he knows his mommy!" said Hagrid.

"Never figured you for a pouf, Hagrid," Al said. "Not that I'm judging, mind you. It's your life, love who you want."

Ignoring Al's running commentary, Hermione asked, "how fast do Norwegian Ridgebacks grow, exactly?"

Hagrid was about to answer, when his face turned white and leapt for the window. Al jumped up behind him, both of them looking out the window to see a blond boy running away.

"Sneaky little maggot, that one," commented Al on his way out the door. "Hold up, I gotta go crush a bug."

He shot a bunch of hexes at Malfoy, and despite Malfoy's zig-zagging, managed to hit the Slytherin. Malfoy fell, and Al kept throwing hexes at him.

"Al, STOP! He's down already!"

Al shrugged, then blew on his wand tip like it was a smoking gun. "Just making sure he stays that way for the foreseeable future." He eyed his handiwork, nudging the blond boy with a toe. "Oh yeah, he'll be in the hospital wing for a few days like this. Wish I knew the memory modification spell. Alas and alack, I do not."

With a swish and a flick, Al levitated Malfoy and took him toward the castle.

"Where're you going, Al?" Ron asked. "You'll get in trouble!"

"Eh, whatever. Gonna get in trouble either way, I might as well get it over with quicker. You watch Hagrid, make sure his house doesn't catch fire or something. I'll catch you two later."

Al was surprised when all he got for hexing Malfoy was 10 points off Griffindor and a single detention with McGonagall writing lines. He'd kind of been expecting more. He suspected that his act of bringing Malfoy to the hospital wing had earned him some mercy. Little did they know, however, that when Malfoy was awake, Al promised him that if he told on Hagrid, "They'll have to put you in St. Mungo's for a month just to figure out who you are." He had gotten quite a chuckle thinking about the sickly pallor Malfoy's already pale skin had turned at that proclamation.

The next time they went to Hagrid's a week later, it had tripled in size and had begun learning how to breathe fire, though it wasn't very good yet, thankfully. The dragon, now named Norbert, was difficult to work with even on its cooperative days, and a menace on its bad days.

Al twirled his wand in his hand, looking irritably at Hagrid. "You know that thing's gonna be bigger than your house soon, right? I don't think Malfoy will dare tell anyone, but he's not big on brains, so who knows. Anyway, you can't keep that thing secret for much longer, Hagrid."

Hagrid looked sad. "I know I can't keep him forever, but I can't just dump him. He's so little. Fer a dragon," Hagrid amended when Al raised an eyebrow at him.

Al looked at Ron, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Your brother Charlie, you said he works with dragons in Romania, right?"

"Oh! Yeah, that's right. Can't believe I didn't think of it myself, mate."

"Wot now?"

"Ron, you should send Charlie an owl, asking him if he'd take Norbert." After a moment's thoughtful pause, he continued, "And tell him to say 'I got the chocolates you sent,' if the answer is yes, and 'I ate 11 of them in an hour,' or whatever other number... you know what," Al said, seeing the bewildered look on Ron's face, "I'll write it, you sign it or something and then send it off. The point is, we don't want anyone intercepting the mail to know what's going on."

"Um... okay."

It took a couple days working together for Ron and Al to come up with a letter to Charlie that satisfied Al, and this is what they wrote:

 _Dear Charlie,_

 _Hi, this is Ron. Have you heard about Harry Potter? He and I are friends. Or rather, THEY and I are friends. Harry turned out to have a bunch of other people sharing his body with him, is that weird or what?_

 _Anyway, we have a bit of a problem here. I'm gonna hand it over to Alastair Potter, one of the others in Harry's body, to explain:_

 _ **Hey. Al here. So someone we know here got a little too excited for Easter and now his Easter present (from Norway) is smoking in his house. Of course, smoking on the grounds is against the rules, has been for a long time. We don't want him to get in trouble, so can you and your mates come take care of the problem? It's a long tale, don't want to get into it, especially since Draco is involved. I hope you get what I'm saying here, because I don't trust certain people to not catch onto this plan. If you understand what I'm getting at, just send an owl back saying "I got the chocolates you sent me," and then how many you ate is the time. Raspberry cremes is AM, Cockroach cluster is PM. If you don't understand, maybe you could come over here and floo us? Anyway, thanks for listening, either way.**_

 _ **Yours sincerely,**_

 _ **Alastair Potter**_

"I dunno mate, that might be too hard to figure out."

Al shrugged. "If it is, then I'll try again."

After a few days, they were at breakfast when Hedwig came soaring in with Charlie's letter. Al took it from her, gave her some bacon, and read it.

 _Dear Ron,_

 _Thanks for the letter. Norwegian Easter egg, huh? I hear the ridge where they make that has a recipe going back centuries. Unusual to see one in the UK, of course. I wish your friend luck with that._

 _Anyway, thanks for the chocolates you sent me, too. We have something like a castle here, too, and I ate 12 raspberry cremes at the northernmost tower last Saturday. I may have to do that again this Saturday too. I think I'll invite several of my friends. I need to get them an Easter present too._

 _Well it's been good hearing from you. Later Ron, Al._

 _Sincerely,_

 _Charlie Weasley_

"Ha! He got it. Well that's a load off," Al said, lighting the letter on fire just in case.

"Does that mean-"

"Later, Ron. Too many eavesdroppers here."

Ron kept bugging Al every few minutes about the letter, Al even threatening to turn his hair into seaweed if he didn't shut it, before finally they got to Charms. Under cover of everyone practicing their Charms work, Al finally spoke.

"Yes, it obviously means this Saturday at midnight," he whispered at his friend. "I figured that out. Top of North Tower, too. Well that would be harder if not for the Invisibility Cloak." He then repeated the information, more politely, to Hermione.

By the end of class, though, Al was getting irritable with everyone. "I don't like looking 14 and being in this class of 11 year olds. It's embarrassing and weird. I'll catch you lot later."

A glow of light later, and Iliana was sitting there in his place. This was getting so common, hardly anyone even looked at them when it happened, and Iliana went right back to work as though nothing had happened.

"You know," Ron said later after Potions class, "It's weird, but when you're Al or Harry, Snape is extra horrible, more so when it's Al than Harry. In fact, he looks downright _murderous_ when it's Al; but whenever you're, well, _you_ , Iliana, he gets quiet, grimaces like he's drunk poison, and stalks off, abnormally quiet for the rest of the class. And then there's how he reacted that first time... that was weird."

"Not really. Remember, he knew my mother. I don't know the nature of their relationship, if she knew him in turn, but he knew her. And fancied her, apparently."

"Oh. I keep forgetting about that. Snape fancying someone is just... odd. Strange to think about. Still, I wonder why he hates Al and Harry so much?"

"No idea."

The next day, though, Ron got a nasty bite off the dragon. He tried to ignore it, but there seemed to be some poison in the bite, making it green and swollen. He had to go to the hospital, lying about what had bit him, and Madam Pomfrey didn't seem to believe him, but didn't make an issue of it. Malfoy was still in the hospital wing, looking ill but better. He kept giving Ron a hard time, sure that he knew what _really_ bit him. Iliana went with Ron, glaring at Malfoy and letting Al drive long enough to give the blond a menacing grin and wink. The effect was somewhat muted coming from Iliana's face, but Malfoy appeared to get the message nonetheless.

When Saturday came around, Ron's hand was still too bad to help, so Iliana and Hermione went down to Hagrid's by themselves. It took a while to get Norbert in the crate and get away from Hagrid, who just **had** to stay behind to say goodbye and weep over the monstrous baby dragon before finally letting it go. Any later, and they might not have gotten to the top of the tower in time. Luckily, Al had done some research and found a spell to help.

"Locomotor crate," Iliana incanted, the crate lifting up and floating ahead of them as they went back to the castle under the invisibility cloak. Between the noisy dragon and the fact they were still solid, it was tricky even then to get it up there. Al was on constant alert for Peeves, Filch, Mrs. Norris, or one of the teachers, his paranoia making the process of moving Iliana's version of the body easier, though it irritated her a little. Several times they had close calls, but at last they made it to the top of North Tower, and waited, Al holding onto the Invisibility Cloak like his life depended on it.

At last, though, Charlie and his friends came swooping down on brooms. How they'd gotten past the wards to do so was a question bothering Al, but he didn't waste time asking. They helped strap Norbert into the lift that Charlie's lot had prepared, and before long Norbert was going, going, gone.

"Quick, get the cloak on," he commanded with Iliana's voice. "No point taking chances. We're not out of the woods yet."

Taking her cue from Al, the two girls got the cloak on and began to creep down the stairs, Al still on the paranoid lookout for trouble. All was going well, until he felt spasms through the shared body and fell down in pain, clutching his head.

"Get going! Leave me! I'll just slow you down."

"What's going on?"

"I don't know, but GO."

The body glowed again, and with the bright light they heard a familiar meow. Abandoning her friend, she took off under the cloak back to the common room, hoping Harry/Al/Iliana was okay.

Mrs. Norris approached the glowing Harry, meowing louder. The prone form looked up at her with a glare and red glowing eyes, hissing at her like a snake. The cat jumped back, her ears plastered to her head, and yowled. But he stopped glowing, and Harry was laying there on the ground, looking perfectly normal.

When he finally started to open his eyes, he saw Filch and Professor McGonagall staring down at him with twin glares.

"Fifty points from Griffindor and a detention in the Forbidden Forest?" Ron said, aghast, when an exhausted-looking Harry told him about it the next day.

"Never mind that, Ron," Hermione said. "What _happened_ last night? Did you just change? If so, why did it hurt you so much?"

"I... I honestly don't know. I felt the pain in my scar, first, like that one time with Snape. Then that seemed to trigger the change. I remember hissing at Mrs. Norris, which scared her, but I don't know why I did it. I... I think there may be another person in there I didn't know about. I hope not, but it's the only explanation I can think of. Though why my scar hurt, I have no idea."

He thought about it some more. "I sensed a presence, just before my scar hurt. At the time I thought it was just Al's paranoia, but now I'm not so sure."

Ron and Hermione shared a concerned glance.

"What's worse," Harry added, "is that whatever happened drained our reserves. I can barely feel the others, I doubt we'll be able to change any time soon. May be a few days."

He wasn't wrong. Later in the week, Wood was very frustrated when Harry was still Harry, needing Iliana to practice for Quidditch. But no amount of yelling at him made him change into any of them.

The draining of the reserves left Harry an exhausted wreck the whole week, too. He slept fitfully, too, which didn't help matters; dreams about red-eyed monsters haunted his nights. He was barely functioning in classes, needing Hermione's help to get through his schoolwork.

When he overheard Quirrell tearfully begging to be left alone, he sighed heavily, as though the mystery of the Stone was just a chore, but listened anyway. He later related the tale in an almost bored tone to his friends. This behavior seemed to be the final straw; Hermione demanded he go up to the hospital wing and tell Madam Pomfrey what was wrong. Sighing, he dragged himself up there and did as she told him. Very soon, she was insisting he stay overnight, making him drink some Dreamless Sleep. He had his first restful night's sleep of the week, and woke up refreshed.

His good mood was not to last, though; McGonagall stopped by with a note for him, informing him that his detention would be at 11 o'clock that night, and he was to meet Filch at the entrance hall.

 _ **Punishing us for going out at night and endangering ourselves by making us go out at night endangering ourselves,**_ Alastair said, sounding stronger than he'd sounded in a week. _**How these people have managed to not get their pants sued off them, I shall never know.**_

 _Uh huh,_ Harry replied apathetically.

 _ **Come to Hogwarts, they said. You'll have fun, they said. Nothing dangerous here! Just a deadly mysterious forest, a three headed dog guarding an immortality stone, a lake monster, and goodness only know what the Hell else they have in this place. Honestly, the standards at this school make me wonder what Stonewall High would've been like.**_

Ignoring Al, Harry went about his day, feeling better but still not great. He had an even harder time that day with concentrating, given Al's running diatribe against the school, which he was ignoring because it would take too much effort to tell Al off, and wouldn't do any good anyway.

 _ **And mysterious Presences in the halls at night, setting off god-knows-what in our heads. Nightmares, haven't slept well in a week. Are there any other schools of magic we can go to? I don't know if I like this place anymore.**_

 _Shut up, Al. I know you're just scared._

 _ **Damn right I'm scared. It's bad enough we have this dangerous Forbidden Forest, but sending kids out there at night for a detention? I think I'd prefer Filch's thumbscrews.**_

Harry put his head in his hands and sighed loudly.

"Worried about your detention, mate?"

"Well, Al is. And he won't shut up about it."

 _ **Why us, anyway? Why has Fate decided to pull down its pants and take a massive crap on US? What did we do to deserve-**_

"AHHHH!" Harry roared, frustrated.

 _ **Erm... Sorry.**_

 __ _I just want to retreat right now, let you take over._

 _ **Wish I could. Not enough energy.**_

 __ _I know._ He sighed again.

At eleven that night, Harry went down to his detention. On the way there, he finally identified one of the sources of his discomfort as missing having Iliana's form. He'd gotten so used to being Iliana that it was weird to him now when he wasn't her. His own body felt... wrong somehow. But then he saw Filch, and that thought left his mind as dread of the coming detention came instead.

Harry barely listened as Filch ranted about the punishment he'd _like_ to be giving Harry as they went to the forest. He wasn't paying attention to Al, either, or he might have caught Al's mood in time to stop him speaking.

"Why do you even work here if you hate this place so much? Do you even know how to do magic? Why do they employ you if you're a squib? Not that I care you're a squib, I just think maybe you'd be happier doing something else."

Filch turned white and jerked his head around to face Harry. "How did you... Who told...?"

"I figured it out," Al continued, using Harry's voice, Harry too weak to stop him. "It's not exactly difficult. Never seen a wand on you, never seen you use magic except for purchased potions. Gods, you must loathe this place. So why are you even here?"

"Never you mind. We're almost there."

Harry blinked. He'd been expecting to be screamed at by an enraged Filch, but instead the man just went quiet, like he was scared to talk with Harry. Counting their lucky stars, neither he nor Al spoke again, until...

"Hagrid? We're having our detention with you?"

"Don't get too excited, boy," Filch said, with less than his usual enthusiasm. "You're still going into the Forest. Hard work and pain, that's what you're in for. Think on this next time you consider breaking the rules again, boy."

Still, his heart did lift. It wouldn't be pleasant, but with Hagrid it wouldn't be too bad. Or so he thought, until he found out what they were doing. Apparently, a unicorn had been hurt and was bleeding. Something had been killing unicorns, and Hagrid didn't know what was doing it.

"Oh hey, great!" Al said in Harry's voice, "Just lovely. Something that can run faster than a human, some unknown monster is killing them, and WE get to march in there and find it and stop it. Oh frabjuous day, caloo calay! What bloody FUN we're gonna have, being in mortal peril together, Hagrid! We should do this EVERY weekend. Invite Hermione and Ron along, too! Hell, invite the whole school along! Make a holiday of it!"

"Tha's enough cheek outta yeh, Alastair. This is wha's been decided, an we're gonna do it. No amount of bellyachin's gonna change tha."

"Fine, whatever. Let's get this over with."

"Besides which, yeh'll be with me, and ain't nothin in the forest that'll hurt you if yer with me or Fang."

"Yeah, except that you don't know what's doing it, so that kind of suggests they're not from around these parts."

Hagrid picked up a massive crossbow, armed it. Al resisted the urge to comment on how reassuring that wasn't, and followed Hagrid into the Forest, his wand out, his paranoia so strong that even he hadn't noticed Harry was no longer driving the body, even though they hadn't transformed. Fang the boarhound followed along, glancing at Al-Harry every now and then with concern in its doggy eyes.

"Damn it," he muttered after a few minutes of jumping at every small noise. "Should've been in Slytherin. I'm no brave Griffindor."

"Why would yeh want ter be in ruddy Slytherin?"

"I fit the traits. Clever, prideful, ambitious. I think my paranoia even fits. And maybe I could've made a difference, reached out to the other Slytherins, changed some minds. I doubt that'll work now."

"Yeh're not pureblood."

"You said yourself, nobody is these days. And being a Potter, I'm sure Slytherin house would've been thrilled to have me. Especially being Harry Potter."

"Yeah, well... anyway, yeh should concentrate on bein quiet, Al. Not safe out 'ere."

"Yes. And you can bet I will be lodging a formal complaint about this, if I survive."

"Don't talk like that, Al; yeh'll survive fine. Now hush, and pay attention."

A sudden noise startled Al again, and he almost fired at it, but it was just a centaur. He gaped at it in awe, having never seen one before. From the waist on up, a man, attached to a horse's body where the head would normally be. Looking at the naked torso of the centaur, he felt... certain feelings... from Iliana, and blushed.

Hagrid had a frustrating conversation with the centaurs, trying to get them to tell him if they'd seen anything unusual in the forest, but if they knew anything, they weren't talking about it; they just kept referring to how bright Mars was, as though that was some kind of answer.

Finally, Hagrid gave up and dragged Fang and Al/Harry on down the path to continue the search for the unicorn. The further they went from the comforting presence of the centaurs, the more scared Al got. Again, he kept jumping at every little noise. At one point, he even shouted.

"I ent gonna tell yeh again, Al, be quiet like, okay?"

Al nodded, and forced himself to calm down. It wasn't easy, but if he viewed the situation as being in a first-person shooter video game, it helped. Several minutes he concentrated on calming himself down, telling himself that what they needed was calm analysis of the situation; keep a level head in the face of danger, that was the best bet to get out alive and in one piece.

As he calmed down a bit, he was able to enjoy the smell of the fresh, tree-scented air. This, combined with the night-time noises from animals and the feel of the forest loam under his feet, lulled him into some kind of trance, which in turn triggered something in him. He froze, Hagrid not noticing because he was still checking on the unicorn blood. He fell to his knees, which alerted Hagrid, and felt his body go rigid.

"Harry? Al? Wha's tha matter?"

His body glowed, temporarily blinding Hagrid in the dark. When he could see again, Harry looked like Harry still, no apparent changes in form, though his body language was utterly transformed. No longer was he the nervous, tense Al, jumping at everything. Nor was he a wary but calm Al. He was standing up, alert but relaxed, his wand put away. The boy's head jerked around like a bird's from here to there, and something in his stance spoke of an animal, rather than a person. He was also sniffing the air like Fang, only more obviously.

"Er... wha's goin on, Harry? Wha-"

With no warning, Harry shot off like a bolt into the woods, going off the trail.

"Harry! Don't go orf- damn."

It was incredible. The fear had left him. Thought, or at least normal thought, had left him. He ran through the dark woods, some invisible force field ahead of him keeping obstacles like tree branches and twigs from snagging his robes. And he could see where he was going, as though the whole forest were lit with a mild twilight, rather than being dark and foreboding. And the unicorn blood, he could smell it. It smelled both delicious and dangerous at the same time; he did not stop to taste it. Instead, he tracked the animal. He could sense the dying animal's presence now, it wasn't far.

As he ran, his limbs thrilled with the movement. He was running faster than a human normally could, and not getting tired, as though he'd lived his whole life in the forest; running felt as easy to him now as walking did, if not easier. His heart pounding in his ears sounded like the most beautiful music to him, the music of life itself.

He came to a complete stop with supernatural speed and ease, looking at the now dead unicorn, and the dark, hooded creature atop it, drinking its blood from a gash in its body. Without words, without even images, he knew that what the creature was doing was an abomination. As delicious as the unicorn blood smelled, for some reason drinking it was more dangerous than drinking the most deadly poisons.

His lip curled, his teeth bared. This creature was dangerous. It cared not how dangerous drinking unicorn blood was; that alone would be enough, but there was more. There was malevolence in this thing, a malevolence that no normal creature could or would ever project.

Yet despite this, when it turned to look at him, he felt no fear. Only rage, a deep rage he couldn't have traced the source of even if he'd been capable of higher thought just then. He growled at it, the sound starting low and then getting louder than the human vocal cords were normally capable of. Light reflecting off the nearby underbrush told him his eyes were glowing red again.

The hooded creature cocked its head, curious and unafraid. His threat being ignored, he growled louder, turning it into an almost-roar. When the creature continued to ignore him, he stamped his foot angrily and gave a full roar; a roar that sounded like it came from a dragon; any nearby animals that hadn't already taken off suddenly departed.

Now THAT had an effect. The hooded creature jumped back, startled. He roared at it again, but the thing seemed to have decided he was all bluff and bluster, and started to advance. A pain erupted in the scar on his head, which only served to further enrage him. He leapt at the creature, and it jumped back. Though in the same instant he realized it was because a centaur had jumped over him, threatening the creature with bow and arrow, making it slither off like some weird levitating snake wearing a cloak.

He growled loudly at the intruder, displeased that anyone would be insolent enough to interrupt _his_ battle, to get between him and his enemy.

"Harry Potter, please calm down. I mean you no harm."

"Oh Firenze, you found 'im. Thank goodness fer that."

"He appears to be wild, like an animal. He growled at me, and roared earlier."

"Yeh, I heard. Reckon they heard it all the way down at the school. Be surprised if they dinnit, ter be honest."

He relaxed. This big man was familiar to him; he smelled of family. And any friend of the big man was someone he could tolerate. He changed his whole posture, standing down. As he did so, the feelings that had anchored him to this state left. He glowed again, and felt thought return. She opened her eyes, and found she was Iliana, now.

"What the... where? Huh?" she said, confused. Then, as she hooked into the collective memory again, "Oh. Well, that was... interesting."

"We should get out of here, Ms. Potter," Firenze said. "It will be faster if you climb on my back."

"Er, are... are you sure?" she asked, her cheeks turning red.

"Yes, now hurry."

"Firenze, I'm-"

"Burdened with your crossbow and your dog, Hagrid. It is fine."

Iliana struggled at first to get up onto the centaur's back, since Firenze had no saddle or reigns, but Hagrid helped her up, and soon enough she was clutching him around his abdomen as they trotted quickly through the forest, Hagrid struggling – despite his size – to keep up.

"What was that thing back there, anyway?" she asked the centaur. "Whoever was in charge of the body at the time wasn't scared of it, just... well... enraged. But it _was_ scary, whatever it was."

Firenze didn't answer at first. He took so long in answering, in fact, that she almost forgot she'd asked a question.

"Do you know what is hidden in the school at this very moment, Ms. Potter?"

"Yes; the Philosopher's Stone. What does that have to do with that thing? I mean, it was drinking unicorn blood, whatever it was."

"It is a terrible crime to slay a unicorn. They are so pure, and innocent, that though drinking its blood will keep you alive even if you are an inch from death, the life you live from that point on will be a cursed life, a half life. Can you think of noone who would choose such a life? Noone who would cling so desperately to life at any cost?"

She narrowed her eyes in thought. "Do you mean... was that Vol-"

"Firenze!" one of the other centaurs, the one called Bane, called out. "What are you doing? You have a human on your back! Have you no shame? Are you a common mule?"

"Do you not recognize the Potter child? The chorus that sings the song against evil? The quicker they leave the forest, the better."

"What have you been telling them? We have sworn not to set ourselves against the portents of the heavens!"

 _ **Oh great, dissension among the ranks. And us caught in the middle.**_

Hagrid finally caught up, breaking up the fight at last by grabbing Iliana and marching her out of the forest over his shoulder like she was a doll. Given that his crossbow was strapped to his back and a little too close for comfort, this did not please them. But they were close enough now that he put her down outside the forest and walked with her up to the castle, determined to guard her all the way inside.

When she got back, she told Ron and Hermione everything that had happened, though it was hard because there were lots of eavesdroppers around, lots of people having heard the dragonish roars from the Forest. It took a lot of finesse to convince them to scram, and only when it was just the three of them did she finish her story. Which, naturally, got them into a conversation full of fear about Voldemort.

That night, she had a hard time getting to sleep, thoughts of Voldemort worrying her. The Stone; Snape was trying to get the Philosopher's Stone for Voldemort. That evil git, immortal? Well, more immortal than he already seemed to be, anyway. Not a comforting thought at all. She fully expected to have nightmares that night. She was surprised, later, to find the only dreams she remembered were dreams about how amazing it had felt to be... well... whatever that animal-like Other had been, as he ran through the forest in their dreams.


	4. The Many Faces face the Two-Faced

The Many Faces of Harry Potter

By = Fayanora

Note: Again, I copied and pasted in a few places. I do try to limit how much I do that, but sometimes I just can't improve upon the original.

Note two: There was a question about Harry's transformation in the Forbidden Forest, and so I will note here what happened: The animal-like Other (who gets named in this chapter) was the one transforming there, and the changes were all internal, in Harry's body, to increase strength, stamina, and give him night vision.

Note three: There was also a question about where I get inspiration for each of the other Faces. As to that, they match certain archetypes that a lot of Multiple collectives seem to have. Alastair is the Protector (in fact his name is a version of Alexander, which means "Defender of humanity." Lots of Multiples have an Alex or Alexander or Alastair in their collectives, I've found.) His personality is loosely based on my own Alex, though Al is much more likable than my Alex. Zoey is obviously the archetypal child member of the collective, loosely based on one of my system's child Faces, Molly. I'm not sure what, if any, archetype Iliana would fit under, but she is very, very, VERY loosely based on two of our collective's Faces, Fayanora and Tempest. The new animal-like Face (named Tier) is based loosely on what our collective member "Pi" was like when we first became aware of xer, except that Pi has always known language, where Tier doesn't so far.

"Write what you know," right? :-)

As to the physical appearances of Harry's others, yes, I deliberately made Iliana look like Lily and Alastair look like Sirius because thinking about the reactions of people around them who knew the people they resembled made me laugh. I never bothered coming up with an explanation for it, but I suppose if magic can let you remember the night your parents were killed despite you being younger than 5 (which most people can't remember their infancy because of the way the brain sacrifices memory for learning) and an infant, then it could let them remember other things from infancy, like the faces of friends and family.

I didn't intend on there being any similarities between Tier and Remus, though I can see the resemblance, personality-wise, between Tier and Remus's werewolf side. (Tier looks like Harry so far.) Tier is much tamer than a werewolf, though, and him biting someone would be no worse than any bite from a human, except that he'd have a little more power behind it because of the changes from the transformation.

Chapter Four: The Many Faces Face the Two-Faced

It was odd, at exam time, how they kept switching between pants-shitting terror of Voldemort, and their new collective mate's mournful pining for the Forbidden Forest. Both conditions were extremely distracting, and they were struggling to get through the exams.

"We've decided to call it Tier," Iliana said one day after a particularly annoying exam, pronouncing it 'tee-air.' "It means 'animal' in German."

"'It'?" Hermione asked her, confused.

"Him, I mean. Tier's a... well we think he's a male, so that's what we're going with for now."

 _ **Yeah, and I wish he would stop pining for the forest already, it's annoying.**_

Their mood did not improve, however; Tier just got worse, if anything. And for reasons none of them could fathom, Tier got most agitated around Professor Quirrell, and it took all their collective willpower to keep it from attacking the man's turban. And they kept finding themselves having to explain why they were growling, however quietly, whenever Snape was nearby as well. Only Iliana's effect on Snape had saved them from a detention at one point, because of it.

With all of that going on, it was no wonder they found it hard to think. But think they did, and in fact something kept bothering them collectively, and Al in particular, about the whole Stone mystery. It was only after their last exam in History of Magic that their mind cleared enough for Al, his concern wresting control of the body from Iliana but not triggering them to transform away from her appearance, to sit there staring into space, thinking, ignoring the conversation about the exams that Hermione insisted on, despite the fact that they'd finished with them all.

"What gets me," Al said, rubbing their shared scar in annoyance, "is how this damned thing keeps hurting all the time now. It would only hurt every now and then before, but ever since that night in the forest, it's been going off every few hours. And pain relief potions don't really help."

"Well go to Madam Pomfrey," Hermione suggested.

He continued to sit there, rubbing the scar, not talking, until suddenly he burst out in anger, "I wish I knew what this MEANS! This isn't some normal pain. This scar, it's magical somehow. I think it's a warning, danger's coming."

"Don't worry so much, Al. The Stone is safe as long as Dumbledore's around. Dumbledore's the only person You-Know-Who was ever scared of. Neville will play Quidditch for England before Hagrid lets Dumbledore down. Anyway, your glower looks weird on Iliana's face."

Al bolted up suddenly, standing, "Shit, that's it!" He began to march off, the other two scrambling to catch up.

"What's up, Al?"

"I forgot, when Malfoy almost got away with seeing Norbert, that I'd gotten to within an inch of it in our conversation with Hagrid. You two didn't appear to notice, but I said it was highly convenient for him to just _find_ an effing dragon egg. The one thing Hagrid wanted the most since he was a kid, and some bloke in a pub just manages to have one, when they're illegal? How did I miss this? We're going to Hagrid's place NOW."

When they got to Hagrid's place, they found him shelling peas outside his house.

"Hullo there, finished yer exams? Got time fer a cuppa?"

"First question Yes, second question No," Al said, still in Iliana's version of the body. "We're in a hurry. Hagrid, we need to ask you something. The night you won Norbert's egg, what did the stranger playing you look like?"

"Dunno. Wouldn' take his cloak off."

"And this didn't strike you as suspicious?"

"No, Al. Yeh get lots of funny folk in the Hog's Head. That's the pub it happened at, down in the village. Might've been a dragon dealer, mightn' he? Kept his hood up the whole time."

Al frowned, resisting the urge to comment. "You must've talked, I doubt he just gave you the egg for no reason. What'd you talk about? Did he mention Hogwarts at all?"

"Might've come up," Hagrid admitted, frowning in thought. "He asked me what I did, told him I'm gamekeeper. He asked about the animals I look after, told him that too. Lessee... that got us on interestin' creatures, and I think I mentioned I've always wanted a dragon. Kinda fuzzy there, he kept buyin me drinks. He said he had a dragon egg, wanted ter know if I'd play him for it. But he wanted ter know I could handle it. I told him, after Fluffy, a dragon'd be easy."

Again resisting the urge to box Hagrid's ears, Al asked, "Did he seem... interested in Fluffy?"

"Well yeah. How often do yeh come across a three headed dog, even if it's yer trade? So I told him Fluffy's a piece o' cake if yeh know how to calm him. Just play him a bit o' music and he falls straight to sleep." Hagrid's frown deepened, then turned to horror.

"I shouldn've told yeh that! Forget I said it! Wait, where're yeh goin?"

"Don't blame yourself, Hagrid," Al called back, his temper rising but not at the gamekeeper, "you were hoodwinked."

Fighting the body's attempt to transform, he said to the others, "Come on, we need to go tell Dumbledore that Hagrid accidentally spilled the beans about Fluffy. He needs to know Snape is after the Stone. Damn, must've been easy once he got Hagrid drunk, poor man. He'd never betray Dumbledore while sober. Now where's Dumbledore's office?"

They struggled for several minutes to try to find the headmaster's office, to no avail. Just as they were about to give up, Professor McGonagall appeared, demanding to know why they were indoors on such a lovely day. They told her they were looking for Dumbledore, and to their horror she told them he was out, that he'd received an urgent owl from the Ministry. This resulted in Al biting back a swear word, and the three of them attempting to get her to understand and believe them that the Stone was in danger. It did not work out so well, and they got chased back outside.

As soon as they could, they went back in. "It's tonight," Al said. "Obviously. Why else get rid of Dumbledore? I'd be really surprised if that urgent owl was genuine. More likely the Ministry is going to be confused when he turns up."

"But Al, what can we-" Hermione gasped, and Al turned to look where she was. With a sinking heart, he saw none other than Snape.

The man grimaced in Iliana's direction again, then turned pointedly away to face Ron and Hermione. "Good afternoon," he said with forced nonconcern. "And what would three young Griffindors be doing indoors on a beautiful day like today?"

Al couldn't help himself, he snorted. Snape gritted his teeth. "This coming from the man who's pale as a vampire, and spends all his time in the dungeons where it's dark and dank. Interesting how you assume everybody just likes bright sunshine and fresh air, especially when you don't appear to do so yourself."

He grinned to himself at the sound of Snape's teeth grinding. The man otherwise ignored Al-liana.

"You want to be more careful," said Snape. "Hanging around like this, people will think you're up to something. Now LEAVE, before I MAKE you leave."

They turned to leave, but Snape called back, "Potter, be warned. That face you're wearing right now will not protect you from me forever. Do not think I will hesitate to have you expelled if I catch you at any more night-time wanderings."

Thankfully, he then strode off toward the staffroom.

When they were out on the steps, Al turned to Ron and Hermione. "Alright, so we need to watch that git, make sure he doesn't head towards Fluffy. Hermione, you do that. You can pretend to be waiting for Professor Flitwick, you're always so abnormally worried about failing your tests, you really should see a therapist for that, by the way."

She blushed, but nodded. "I'll go keep an eye on Snape then," she said, stalking off.

"You and I, third floor corridor."

"Right."

This did not go exactly as planned for them. McGonagall got very cross with them, complaining that two 11 year old wizards weren't going to be any help and that their help wasn't needed anyway, and they had to rush away to the common room to avoid further invoking her wrath. Soon after, Hermione showed up, Snape having waylaid her by bringing out Flitwick and taking off while she was talking with him to try to keep her cover. Al stood there thinking.

"Well there's nothing else for it. If we can't get the teachers to take us seriously, and we can't stand guard, we'll have to go out tonight. It's insane, it's suicidal, but if there were any other option, I think we'd have thought of it by now."

"Al, that's ridiculous! What if you get expelled?"

He glowered at her. "Better expelled and Voldemort foiled than in school with him running the place or worse. Haven't you heard what it was like back when he was powerful? Death, destruction, and dark arts everywhere! No, I won't risk that happening again. If that means I'm expelled, well, I'll just see if I can join Hagrid as apprentice gamekeeper. I'm not letting the man who murdered my parents come back to life, I'm not letting that Stone fall into his hands!"

They looked grim, but nodded.

"So what's the plan?" Ron asked, knowing Al never acted without one. Hermione nodded, and chimed in that she would help too.

Al blinked in surprise, then looked thoughtful. "You two sure you're willing to risk being expelled? If they'd expel the Boy Who Lived, I doubt they'd hesitate to expel the two of you."

"I'd almost like to see them try," Hermione said. "After I got a hundred and twelve percent on my Charms exam. Flitwick told me. If they throw me out after that, they're mad."

He nodded curtly. "Right then. So let's talk plan..."

While they waited for night-time, the three of them researched for anything that might help them. Al sat around, Iliana long since resigned to him making her face look intense as he tried to work out what might face them soon, and how to counter it.

When the common room finally emptied, Al had the invisibility cloak and Iliana's broomstick with them, as well as a roughly carved wooden flute Hagrid had given him for Christmas. _**Fortuitous, that,**_ he thought to himself.

He was just discussing the cloak when Neville got up from a chair. How they hadn't spotted him, Al didn't know. He glowered at the boy, wondering if Iliana's face gave the glower more or less of an impact.

"What are you three doing? Iliana, you shouldn't be out again. You lost 50 points last time. And now three of you? What if she takes 50 points apiece? We're almost done for the year, we'll lose if you're caught!"

Al paused to weigh his options. He considered telling Neville the truth, but they were already running late. Who knew how far Snape had gotten? It might already be too late.

"Sorry, Neville, but this is an emergency. Literally life and death, and we don't have time to explain further."

Neville stood in the way of the portrait hole. "Don't give me that. I'm not stupid, you know. If it was that important, you'd tell the teachers."

"We did. They don't believe us."

"Well I don't believe you either. If you want past me, you'll have to fight me!" He put his hands up like a boxer.

Al sighed, and gave Hermione a pointed look.

"Petrificus totallus!" she said, wand pointing at the boy, and Neville went into a full body bind, falling over on his back.

While Ron looked in fear upon Hermione, Al passed Neville and said, "Sorry, Neville; we'll explain later."

"I'm really very sorry about that," Hermione apologized on her way past.

"Yeah mate, you'll understand later, if we don't die."

 _ **Great, thanks for that reminder, Ron,**_ Al thought, feeling the fear returning. _**Bloody Griffindor traits. Ah well, nothing else for it.**_

It was a very tense time, winding their way silently through the dark castle under the cloak. As it was, they had a close call with Filch's cat, and nearly got caught out by Peeves, which had Al freezing up, unsure what to do. If it hadn't been for Harry in the back of their mind coming up with a great plan, tricking Peeves into thinking they were the Bloody Baron, they wouldn't have gotten past.

"Brilliant, Al!" whispered Ron.

"That one was Harry's idea."

"Nice one, mate."

Al felt himself sweating, his heart racing, as they opened the door to Fluffy's chamber. It looked very menacing, growling at their invisible forms, sniffing the air for their scent. Al put the flute to his lips, and began to play, badly. But that didn't seem to matter; from the very first notes, the enormous dog's eyes drooped, and it was soon fast asleep. So asleep, in fact, that Ron was able to push its paw away from the trapdoor without waking it up. But the moment he stopped playing, it started to wake up again, so he had to keep it up. This made giving orders a mite difficult.

"Wow, I can't see the bottom," Ron said.

Al blew extra hard on the flute to get Ron's attention, and pushed the brooomstick over to him with his foot. Taking this as a cue, Ron commanded it to go UP! Soon, the three of them were on the broomstick, flying down the hole. Al stopped playing once they were in, and almost immediately heard Fluffy barking.

Putting the flute away, he used his wand to shine a light. When they reached the bottom, the light shone on some ugly-looking black plant thing.

"Devil's snare!" Hermione said. "It's very dangerous, it likes strangling people to death."

"Okay, so how do we get past it?"

"It doesn't like light and heat."

"Okay, so let's use fire then."

She nodded, getting out her wand. The other two did as well, and soon they had a brilliant fire going, which scared the Devil's Snare to move toward the walls, leaving an opening big enough for them to fly through. In a flash, they were through and stepping off onto the floor.

"Given that we didn't see any corpses, I'd take it as a sign Snape got through okay, too."

They walked on through the dark corridor, Al and company sincerely hoping that there were no dragons down here, like there were in some of the Gringott's vaults. He was both relieved and annoyed when they found a room full of what looked like glittering birds.

Ron went to check the opposite door, which was locked.

"They're keys," Al said, Iliana's sharp eyes coming in handy. "This must be Flitwick's. The Devil's Snare was Sprout's, obviously."

"And there are brooms here."

"You guys take those, I'll use Iliana's."

"We're looking for big, old-fashioned one, probably silver, like the handle," Ron said.

They got on their respective broomsticks. Al, recognizing that he sucked at this sort of thing, gave control of the body back to Iliana. She'd been listening in on everything and was thus able to take control without any adjustment period, before zooming off after the key, helped along by the fact that the one she sought had a bent wing; Snape must have manhandled it on his way through. Even with that edge, though, there were still thousands of keys, and they moved like a great hive mind, in murmurations like starlings. As such, it took strategy and teamwork, Iliana shouting orders at the others, to finally pin the thing down and wrestle it into the keyhole. But at last, they were through the door.

The next chamber was dark at first, then lit up when they got in. A giant chess set met them, with a whole lot of bored-looking stone chessmen standing around, which glanced up as they entered. The opposing white pieces, on the other hand, had no faces.

"We defer to you on this one, Ron," Al and Iliana told him. Playing their way across a giant chess set, it had to be Ron for that; he beat Hermione, Al, Harry, and Iliana every time any of them tried to play him, often in a handful of moves.

Ron considered things for a few minutes before nodding and giving commands. At his command, Iliana and Hermione took the place of a bishop and a castle, respectively. Ron took the place of a knight.

It was an intense game, made all the more so by the fact that the white players bashed the black pieces into unconsciousness. Al winced whenever it happened, not wanting to know how bone would fare under the kind of power needed to knock out a stone man. He and Hermione had several close calls, where Ron almost didn't rescue them in time, making Al worry he'd piss himself. Or rather, piss Iliana's pants... whatever.

Then they came to a spot where Ron stood there for a very long time staring at the white queen, considering, thinking so hard Al could almost hear the gears turning.

"Right. Sorry, but there's only one way to win this. I've got to be taken."

"Are you crazy? Those bloody things could KILL you!"

"That's chess!" snapped Ron. "You've got to make some sacrifices! I make my move and she'll take me — that leaves you free to checkmate the king, Al!"

"Yes, but-"

"Do you want to stop Snape getting the Stone or not?"

Al glared at him. "Yes, but-"

"Well we're running out of time! This will work, and it's the only move that will."

"Fine then. But if you die, I'll kill you."

Ron grinned. "Understood. Now don't hang around once you win, okay? I don't mind dying. Prefer not to, but to stop You-Know-Who..."

"Just tell us what to do."

Ron told him where to move, once the queen took him. He nodded. Ron took a bracing breath, then moved into position.

"Check."

The queen marched right at him, and swung at him, hitting him on the head. He was out cold. Hermione almost moved, but Al stopped her. Then, gritting his teeth, he moved into position.

"Checkmate."

The white king took off its crown and threw it down at Al's feet. They'd won. Quickly, they rushed over to check on Ron. He appeared to still be alive.

"Damn it. But he's alive. You heard what he said, let's go on."

It pained them to do so, but they moved on.

In the next chamber was a giant troll, knocked out.

"Thank goodness for that," Al said, hurrying past the stench.

The next room they ran into had a line of bottles. They'd scarcely even noticed this when a fire sprang up behind them, blocking the way back. A black fire blocked their way forward.

Al noticed a scroll by the bottles, and read it. It was a riddle. Handing it quickly over to Hermione, he said, "This one's all you. My brain hurts just reading it."

She read it, and reread it, several times, moving along the row and obviously working it out. It took her over ten minutes, though how long he didn't know, not having a watch on him. But at last, she perked up.

"I've got it. The smallest bottle moves us forward."

Al looked inside the bottle. "Only enough here for one person. Which one gets us back?"

Hermione pointed at a rounded bottle at the right end of the line.

"Right. You take that one. No, hear me out. Take Iliana's broom and get Ron to the hospital wing. Then let Dumbledore know where I am, if you can. If not him, then McGonagall. We need help with this, I'm no match for Snape."

"But Al, what if You-Know-Who is with him?"

"Well we were lucky once, maybe we'll be lucky again. Heck, for all I know there were even more of us before, and one of them died protecting me, like a cat with nine lives. Anyway, get going, we're in a hurry."

"Al... you and the others are really great, you know. So don't die, okay? I'll be very cross with you if you die."

"If I die, I'll haunt you, okay?"

She laughed, a broken laugh.

"Now scram, okay? I'll see you later, one way or another."

She nodded, taking the potion to get back. He watched her go through the flames before taking his own. It was like ice flooding his body. Iliana's body. Whatever. Screwing up his courage, he stepped through the black flames and saw... not Snape. Not even Voldemort. It was... Quirrell?

In just a few seconds, everything clicked into place. Suddenly he felt like a fool. Of _course_ it wasn't Snape; Snape had fancied his mum, he must have been protecting them, even if Harry looked like his father and Iliana like their mother. And this explained why Tier always got so agitated around Quirrell. He remembered Percy saying the turban was new; he remembered overhearing Quirrell begging mercy from someone. In an instant, he knew Quirrell wasn't alone. Voldemort was under that turban, had been the whole time. He felt sick at the thought.

The man was smiling at him; he must have heard them talking in the other room. His wand already out, Al recovered his wits and fired hexes at the man, who parried them expertly. Gone was the quivering, shivering, scaredy-cat fake Quirrell; he was seeing the real man for the first time ever.

"What, not surprised, Potter?" Quirrell bantered. "Was it so obvious? No wait, I saw those gears clicking into place in your face; you _were_ surprised, but not shocked. You put it together, when you saw me here."

"Stop talking and fight!" Al shouted, still hurling hexes.

"Oh Ms. Potter, I haven't even started fighting yet. I'm playing with you, like a cat with a mouse."

His scar flared with pain, and he felt Tier wake up. But he couldn't afford to let Tier have control, so he fought with all his might to keep control. Fought so hard that he triggered a transformation into his own version of the body, at last.

"Ah, so it's Alastair Potter I duel with, not Iliana. No matter, you just lost!" Quirrell said, hitting Al with a spell binding him with magical ropes.

"Now do hold still while I go back to trying to figure out this damnable mirror," he said, turning back to stare at what Al recognized as the Mirror of Erised.

 _ **Dumbledore,**_ he thought. He wondered if he could scoot closer, maybe see how to get the stone before Quirrell could. He attempted it, and fell over. So he went with option B: distraction.

"I take it that troll in the dungeon, on Halloween, was your doing?"

"Yes, Potter, indeed. I have a special gift with trolls — you must have seen what I did to the one in the chamber back there? Unfortunately, while everyone else was running around looking for it, Snape, who already suspected me, went straight to the third floor to head me off — and not only did my troll fail to beat you to death, that three-headed dog didn't even manage to bite Snape's leg off properly."

 _ **Wish he'd bitten YOUR leg off, you evil git.**_

"This mirror is the key to finding the Stone," Quirrell murmured, tapping his way around the frame. "Trust Dumbledore to come up with something like this … but he's in London … I'll be far away by the time he gets back. …"

"Voldemort is under your turban, isn't he?"

Quirrell shuddered at the sound of his master's name. "Y-yes," he said, sounding briefly like his fake nervous self again. "You're quite right. I am never alone."

"Well that's just bloody disgusting. Why are you helping him, then, if he's just a parasite? What could he possibly do to you?"

"It's not what he could do _to_ me that concerns me, Potter, but what he can do _for_ me. Once he is restored to power, to life, the one who helped him will be rewarded greatly. In fact... well, I hesitate to share the credit, but I must admit this mirror is confounding me. If you'd like to help me, I'm sure my master could forget his quarrel with you, and give you anything you want."

"Oh really? Can he bring my parents back to life, then? Or is that just a little beyond him?" Al asked, reading the answer in Quirrell's annoyed face. "Well if that's the case, tell Moldywart he can go suck an egg."

" _Such a mouth on you, Potter,"_ said a hoarse whisper of a voice, chuckling at his cheek.

"At least I have my own mouth," Al shot back. "Well, kinda. More so than you do, at any rate."

" _You speak parseltongue?"_ the harsh whisper said in surprise.

"No idea what that means."

"Never mind," the voice said, sounding different in some way to Al's ears now. "Use the boy, Quirrell."

Quirrell untied Al's bonds and dragged him over to the Mirror.

"Tell me what you see," the man demanded.

Al looked in the Mirror. As he did, he felt Harry looking as well. But it was, again, Iliana who appeared in the Mirror. And once more, they saw Harry's parents, _their_ parents. And their mother was winking at them, and mouthing the words "I love you all, my brave children," just before slipping something into their pocket. Something that they felt as a real, solid weight.

 _ **Well that's interesting,**_ he thought. _**Now what?**_

"Tell me what you see, Potter!" Quirrell demanded.

 _Lie, of course,_ Iliana said.

Knowing the best lies were half truths, Al said, "I see my parents. Our parents. Harry's parents. They're saying they love us."

"Oh how touching," Voldemort said sardonically. "But I sense you're hiding something from me. TELL THE TRUTH!"

"Yes, Potter, tell the truth! What do you see?"

"I see Dumbledore hexing you to oblivion, destroying what little is left of you, and your name being gleefully forgotten, _Moldywart_."

"INSOLENT WHELP! Let me speak to him face to face!"

"M-master, you are not strong enough."

"I know my own strength, Quirrell. Now do as I command!"

 _ **Oh god, Hell no,**_ Al thought as he felt bile and vomit rise in his throat in anticipation of what was coming. He tried to look away as Quirrell undid his turban, in slow motion, the world crawling past inch by inch. He tried to run, but he was powerless.

Still rooted to the spot, the back of Quirrell's head became exposed, and it was like he'd turned over a stone and exposed some disgusting, maggoty, rotting corpse underneath. Before he could stop himself, he felt vomit exit his mouth and splatter to the floor, his legs weakening at the sight. Voldemort's snakelike face was sticking out of the back of Quirrell's head, an image he knew would forever be burned into his retinas.

"Alastair and Harry Potter," the disgusting thing spoke. He sensed a monologue coming on, and tried to say something to stop it, but he just leaned over and retched onto the floor again, the scar on his forehead burning like a branding iron.

"See what I have become?" the face said. "Mere shadow and vapor … I have form only when I can share another's body … but there have always been those willing to let me into their hearts and minds. … Unicorn blood has strengthened me, these past weeks … you saw faithful Quirrell drinking it for me in the forest … and once I have the Elixir of Life, I will be able to create a body of my own. … Now … why don't you give me that Stone in your pocket?"

"Fuck!" he shouted, and bolted for the door, not caring if he could get through the fire or not. But he didn't get there; Quirrell grabbed his foot. He kicked the man in the face with his other, but then the man got wise and shot spells at him, making him have to zig-zag like Malfoy.

"Don't be a fool," snarled the face. "Better save your own life and join me … or you'll meet the same end as your parents. … They died begging me for mercy. …"

"LIAR!" Al shouted.

Quirrell was walking backward at him, so that Voldemort could still see him. The evil face was now smiling.

"How touching …" it hissed. "I always value bravery. … Yes, boy, your parents were brave. … I killed your father first, and he put up a courageous fight … but your mother needn't have died … she was trying to protect you. … Now give me the Stone, unless you want her to have died in vain."

"Not even when Hell freezes over!" he shouted.

"SIEZE HIM!"

Before he could get away, Quirrell grabbed his arm. They struggled, but Al faltered as he sensed Zoey coming out. He tried to fight it, but they glowed, and the little girl was being lifted by her arm. She grabbed the Stone from their pocket and screamed "FUCK YOU!" at the top of her lungs, the glow of transformation already suffusing them, enveloping them. As Al returned, he felt the Stone vanish Inside with Zoey, wherever the Hell things went when she took them with her. He was utterly astonished; he'd never before seen her take anything Inside that she hadn't brought out, and thus made, herself. Voldemort roared with rage.

"GIVE IT TO ME! GIVE ME THE STONE!"

"I CAN'T, ASSHOLE! Zoey took it Inside, only she can bring it back! And I'm fairly certain if you killed me, you'd never get it back in a million years."

The hideous face contorted with rage, and he pushed Al down, the two bodies struggling again. "I'LL TORTURE IT OUT OF YOU, THEN!"

"Good luck with that, maggot-breath!"

Tier suddenly joined the fray, eyes glowing red like hot coals, his roar echoing in the stone chamber, deafening both of them. Al took the opportunity to lunge at his attacker, clutching the man's face in his desperation for something to do, too amped up to even think about his wand. Luckily, it paid off, and Quirrell's skin burned at the touch. The man screamed, and tried to stop, but Voldemort egged him on. He lunged at Al, and Al pressed his advantage, burning every inch of the man with wild abandon.

As the man's screams intensified, something shifted Inside, and Iliana came out completely, finding herself burning the man, the strange magic causing him to fall over dead before her very eyes, which became wide as dinner plates. She'd killed a man! She'd never killed anything in her life before, not even insects, but here was a human being, who had been alive only moments ago, lying dead on the stone floor, and she was the cause. Al had initiated it, but she had delivered the killing blow.

Her body filled with numb dread. She couldn't even think, or feel. And like her state of mind, the body was also frozen in place. It wasn't until the ghostly apparition of Voldemort rushed her and went right through her, past the black fire, that she felt anything again; surprise, terror. She fell backwards, her eyes rolling into the back of her head. She saw a tall figure just before passing out, heard a voice call her name. Then all was black.

Consciousness took its sweet time returning to them, caught as they were in fitful nightmares. Over and over again, she saw the dead man, face burned like charred meat on a grill, pointing an accusing finger at her. His dead eyes burned with rage, with condemnation. Then consciousness flooded back like a tidal wave, and she woke screaming. She felt hands hold her down, and panicked; were they attacking her? What if she killed more people in her desperate bid for safety? She begged them to stop, pleaded with them, wept openly. _Don't let me be a murderer! Please no! Stop! For your own safety, STOP!_

Hands grabbed her head, forced her mouth open, and forced liquid down her throat. She felt herself shudder, then relax. But she was still crying, tears hot and wet and salty ran into her mouth. _No... I don't want to hurt anyone. I... no... please..._

When next they awoke, it was Al whose eyes took in the daylight. Memories flooding back to him, he looked Inside in some concern. Where was Iliana? He couldn't sense her anywhere. He sensed Harry groggily awaken, and Zoey, and even Tier. But Iliana was conspicuously absent.

"Ah, they're awake," a voice said. "And not screaming this time, that's good."

 _ **Dumbledore,**_ he thought, recognizing the voice. He turned to look at the man through eyes thick with sleep dust, then rubbed the crud out of his eyes.

"Alastair?" Dumbledore asked.

"Yeah, tha's me."

"Ah good. Of course, it's Alastair's version of the body, but I've learned that doesn't necessarily mean anything. How are you, my boy?"

"I feel horrible. How long were we out?"

"Three days. Mr. Ronald Weasley and Miss Granger will be most relieved you have come round, they have been extremely worried."

"Three days? Wow." He grimaced suddenly, his face a rictus of pain, as he remembered Quirrell. "What happened? Did you get Hermione's owl?"

"We must have crossed in midair. No sooner had I reached London than it became clear to me that the place I should be was the one I had just left. I arrived just in time to pull Quirrell off you —"

"It was you, then."

"I feared I might be too late."

"You nearly were, I couldn't have kept him off me much longer."

"I hate to ask so soon, my boy, but the Philosopher's Stone. I know Voldemort did not get it, for I saw his spectral form exiting the chamber, but I could not locate the Stone. It wasn't in the mirror."

"Ah, yes. About that. Zoey appeared, in the middle of the fight. She grabbed the Stone, and took it Inside with her."

"Indeed? Well, that is very curious indeed. Is it still there?"

"Yes. I can sense it. I don't know where it is exactly, but it's Inside. It's safe."

"Hmm... well, Nicolas will be quite pleased to hear that. I did suspect, given some of the things I've heard about the youngest of you, but there was no way to know for sure until you woke up. Neither Poppy nor myself were able to find any trace of the Stone in your body. So where it is, exactly, is anyone's guess."

"Yeah. And it's weird. I didn't know she could take real objects Inside with her."

"It is entirely possible that she cannot. The Stone is a magical artifact, made of a form of crystalized magic, in fact. Very difficult to produce, very difficult indeed. But seeing as it's made of magic, it isn't exactly real per se, and that is, I suspect, how young Zoey was able to take it Inside with her."

"Sounds like a good theory to me." He frowned a little. "But Harry's glasses vanish and reappear later, so maybe that's not accurate."

"Hmm... that is indeed a good point, that I admit I had not considered. So perhaps there is more to it than that." Dumbledore sighed. "Of course, this complicates things a little. Nicolas will have to produce his Elixir of Life here in the castle, and I shall have to personally guard young Zoey when she brings the stone back out again, until she can put it back. But that's something we should only need to do once a year at the most, barring unforeseen circumstances."

Al nodded. "Sounds good to me."

"And now, my dear boy, I am curious... how is Iliana?"

"No idea. I can't sense her. None of us can. It doesn't feel like she's gone, though; just... just hiding. Or something."

Dumbledore nodded gravely. "I understand. From what I gather, she was the one in control when Quirrell died?"

"Yes."

He wanted to add how he'd been the one to start the process, how something had unexpectedly gone wonky Inside, forcing her out at just the wrong moment, saddling her with the weight of having killed a man, when it should have been _him_. He was the strong one, _he_ was the one who fought the hard battles, not her. But the words would not come.

Dumbledore, however, seemed almost to read his mind, and smiled at Al kindly. "You wish it had been you instead? So she would not have to feel that pain?"

He couldn't speak, so he just nodded, a tear rolling down his cheek.

"I understand. But I rather suspect that unpleasant job went to the one most capable of bearing it. That's nothing against you, my boy, but you seem to me much like an oak, projecting an air of strength to mask a gentleness and frailty you find shameful, putting on a brave face against the world, (which is important in its own way), while Iliana is more like a reed, appearing weak but bending under the weight of the winds of life, surviving where an oak would crash to its death."

Alastair wanted to be offended, but the man's words had a ring of truth about them, so he merely nodded.

 _Move aside, Al._

 _ **What? Oh Harry... sure thing.**_

Without transforming, Harry took over, and looked at Dumbledore. The elderly wizard smiled at him. "Yes, Harry?"

 _ **How did he know?**_

 _No idea. Not important right now._

"Even assuming Zoey keeps the Stone away from Voldemort forever," Harry said aloud, "does that mean he can't come back?"

"Ah. I'm afraid there are other ways he can come back. He has, shall we say, taken certain steps to guard against death. Steps that appear to have succeeded, more or less. But even if all we can do is thwart him time and again, that is still a major victory, Harry."

"Sir, there are some other things I'd like to know, if you can tell me … things I want to know the truth about. …"

"Ah, yes. The truth. A dangerous thing, the truth can be. But, given my own foolishness in my quest to protect you, Harry, given my mistakes, I will endeavor to answer truthfully. I may refrain from answering, depending on circumstances, but I promise you I will not lie."

 _ **Loquacious bastard, aren't you?**_ Al thought.

He wasn't sure why, but for some reason he believed Dumbledore, despite the man's overdone answer.

"Okay then. Voldemort said that he only killed my mother because she tried to stop him from killing me. But why would he want to kill me in the first place?"

Dumbledore did not answer right away, his face was deep in thought, as though weighing whether or not to speak.

"Alas, Harry... I do not wish to say this, but I must refuse to answer that one, for now, especially in light of Iliana's condition. She does not need any additional stress right now. I shall tell you one day, but not today. I beg your forgiveness on this, for I know it must be frustrating to hear, but you will know when you are older."

 _ **Figures,**_ Al grumbled internally.

"Okay. I disagree about not being ready for that. And I get a sense that whatever it is might actually _help_ Iliana, but I accept your answer, for now."

"Thank you, Harry."

"So why couldn't Quirrell touch me? Us. Why couldn't he touch us?"

"Because of the most powerful force in the world; love. Your mother, who loved you greatly, died to protect you, and that protection is – I think – what saved your life that night in Godric's Hollow. It is an old magic, a powerful magic, and one that Voldemort – who has never known love – cannot understand. And because he cannot understand it, he constantly underestimates its power. Quirrell, full of hatred, greed, and ambition, sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good."

 _ **I smell manipulation there. The stink of clever propaganda,**_ Al said to Harry.

 _I agree, Al. That was just a little too perfect. But I think he has a point about Voldemort not knowing love. It sounds like him._

 _ **Agreed.**_

"Professor Snape. Why does he hate me? Is it because of my father?"

"Ah, yes. They were enemies in school, rather like yourself and Mr. Malfoy. And then, to complicate matters, your father did something that was, to Professor Snape, unforgivable."

"Oh? What's that?"

"He saved his life."

" _What?_ "

"Yes, funny how the human mind works sometimes. Professor Snape wanted to hate your father's memory in peace, but he owed the man a debt, and so tried to save you from Quirrell. Peculiar, is it not?"

 _ **Yeah, 'peculiar' is the word alright. He's hiding something. I don't know what, though.**_

"And sir, there's one more thing …"

"Just the one?"

 _ **Smart ass.**_

"How did we get the Stone out of the mirror?"

"Ah, now, I'm glad you asked me that. It was one of my more brilliant ideas, and between you and me, that's saying something. You see, only one who wanted to find the Stone — find it, but not use it — would be able to get it, otherwise they'd just see themselves making gold or drinking Elixir of Life. My brain surprises even me sometimes. … Now, enough questions. I suggest you make a start on these sweets. Ah! Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans! I was unfortunate enough in my youth to come across a vomit-flavored one, and since then I'm afraid I've rather lost my liking for them — but I think I'll be safe with a nice toffee, don't you?"

 _ **From raging egomaniac to clever distraction in less than twenty seconds,**_ Al quipped. _ **This guy should've been in Slytherin. Oh well, we'll get nothing more out of him now.**_

Tasting a bean, Dumbledore pulled a face, coughing and hacking most convincingly. "Alas, earwax."

Al flashed Harry an image of himself holding up a large white card saying "10.0." Harry actually laughed aloud at that image, and Dumbledore appeared to think he'd laughed at the man's Every Flavor Bean antics.

"Oh, one last thing, Harry, before I go. You'll no doubt recall I promised to make you a ward of Hogwarts. Well that is precisely what I have done; the paperwork and wandwork are almost complete, all that is required now is your signature here on this line," he said, pulling out a roll of parchment, and pointing at a line on the bottom.

"Please read the entire document before you sign, Harry; it is a Gringott's form, and will subsequently not become binding unless you read the entire thing first. Thankfully, it is not long. And I assure you, understanding is not required; just reading."

Harry took a few minutes to read the very boring, jargon-filled parchment. He did manage to get the jist of it, at least. Signing the document meant he would spend his holidays either here at the school or with friends; his affiliation with the Dursleys would be terminated, as would – by the nature of the spell – the protection of his mother's blood, the very thing that had killed Quirrell. Reading this, he did hesitate for the briefest of moments, pondering what he would be giving up. It had saved his life, after all. But then he reminded himself what he would be going back to if he didn't sign, as well as what that protection had cost Iliana, and that decided him. The risk of death was worth the freedom and chance for happiness. He happily signed it and returned it to the headmaster.

"And with that, the deed is done. You are now a ward of Hogwarts."

He wondered if he ought to feel different, because he hadn't felt anything change.

When the headmaster left, Harry triggered a transformation back to his original body, and then had a heated discussion with the matron about visitors, a discussion he won. Soon after, Ron and Hermione came in, and he started getting them up to speed on what had happened, then it was their turn to tell the rest of their side of things.

"Well, I got back all right," said Hermione. "I brought Ron around — that took a while — and we were dashing up to the owlery to contact Dumbledore when we met him in the entrance hall — he already knew — he just said, 'Harry's gone after him, hasn't he?' and hurtled off to the third floor."

"D'you think he meant you to do it?" asked Ron. "I mean, if he knew... and he gave you the cloak to begin with. Passed it on, anyway."

This idea so horrified Hermione that he decided not to tell Ron that he agreed. But when Hermione wasn't looking, he did give Ron a rather pointed look, communicating without words that he seriously believed Dumbledore had tested him and the others in the collective. A thought that infuriated him even as he thought it, because if true, that meant Iliana's post-traumatic stress over being a killer was Dumbledore's fault.

That thought was then followed by other thoughts, and Alastair realized that being tested like that had to be for a _reason._ He thought of Voldemort trying to kill him as a baby, and failing. He thought of how Dumbledore had felt the need to protect him from the wizarding world until the last possible legal moment for a wizard, from Death Eaters. He thought of his ability to use his scar as a diving rod to find Voldemort. And he thought – bizarrely – of all the books he'd read in the library growing up, and it all clicked together. He and Voldemort were linked, and the whole thing had the stink of _destiny_ to it. He groaned aloud; that had to be it! He was a bloody _trope_! He was the Destined Savior. It was going to have to be up to him-up to them, rather-to stop Voldemort.

Oddly, though, this comforted him. He'd half suspected it anyway, he thought, ever since he first heard about that night in Godric's Hollow. Even then, he'd known that being the only person to ever survive a Killing Curse had to be _Significant_. There was no way it could be anything else. Especially with what the centaurs had said about the signs in the stars and planets. What had Firenze called them? The Chorus That Sings The Song Against Evil?

Oh, and the fact that Dumbledore was withholding information, and trying to manipulate him, that had to mean Dumbledore _knew_. Not only that, the man was _using_ him. He was a bloody pawn, and Dumbledore fancied himself the chess master.

What the man _hadn't_ said suddenly became as significant as what he _had_ said. Dumbledore thought him too weak to bear this burden. The man wanted to preserve his innocence, or some similar nonsense. As though he could even remember having such a thing after years of living, unloved, in a house where he was worked like a slave and fed sporadically by people who hated him just for existing.

No, he'd been conscripted as a soldier in the war against Voldemort from the tender age of 1, and everything else in his life thus far had been meant to mold him into the perfect soldier. Hardened by neglect and child abuse, yet apparently the memory of his life before all that stuck around in his subconscious, giving him the ability to love; his mind multiplied into who knew how many different minds, because two heads are always better than one when tackling difficult problems; and of course, having friends at last, loyal friends that were willing to risk death at his side, tying him to the world, helping him to care about its people.

Well, he would show Dumbledore. He would show them all, by accepting the burden willingly. And when Dumbledore finally saw fit to inform him, he could say he knew, from this point on. He would face this war willingly, and he would win, or die trying.

"Harry? You okay, mate?"

Should he tell them? He didn't know. He felt Iliana stirring again, felt her plug into the common memory and get updated. He felt her go through the same series of emotions he and Harry had already been through, felt her come to the same conclusion.

"We're fine. Iliana's back, by the way. She was missing in action until now."

"Yeah, we wondered about her, mate; we heard she woke up screaming the other day."

"I don't think she's over it yet. Killing Quirrell, I mean. She may never be over it. But she's better than she was."

Ron nodded. "Listen, you've got to be up for the end-of-year feast tomorrow. The points are all in. We won, but it was a very narrow victory; Slytherin _almost_ won. I think if Iliana hadn't tried so hard to make up the points you lost that night, we wouldn't have managed it. Oh, and you missed the last Quidditch match, we were steamrollered by Ravenclaw without Iliana — but hey, we won the house championship, and the food'll be good."

"I doubt that will console Wood."

His friends laughed at that. "Too true," Ron agreed.

At that moment, Madam Pomfrey bustled over.

"You've had nearly fifteen minutes, now OUT," she said firmly.

That night's sleep was not exactly great; they had nightmares about Quirrell again, to which were added nightmares about Voldemort killing everyone they loved before torturing and killing them, but regardless, they still felt well enough to go to the feast. He feared it would take a lot of cajoling to get the matron to agree, but she grudgingly admitted that Dumbledore had said he was to go.

"Oh, and you have another visitor."

"Oh? Who?"

As it turned out, it was Hagrid. The large man took one look at Harry in the hospital bed, and burst into tears, throwing himself on Harry like a weepy polar bear.

"It's — all — my — ruddy — fault!" he sobbed, his face in his hands. "I told the evil git how ter get past Fluffy! I told him! It was the only thing he didn't know, an' I told him! Yeh could've died! All fer a dragon egg! I'll never drink again! I should be chucked out an' made ter live as a Muggle!"

"Oh Hagrid, it's not your fault. Voldemort is a manipulative git. He'd have figured it out one way or another, you just had the misfortune to be hoodwinked by him."

"Yeh could've died!" sobbed Hagrid. "An' don' say the name!"

"VOLDEMORT!" Harry bellowed, and Hagrid was so shocked, he stopped crying. "I've met him and I'm calling him by his name. Please cheer up, Hagrid, we saved the Stone, Zoey has it safely locked up Inside."

Consoled at last, Hagrid nodded, then suddenly remembered something; it was a present for Harry.

"Photos. Searched high an low for em, asking everyone who knew your mum and da. Reckon you ought to have something ter remember em by."

None of them could speak. But Iliana took control and hugged the large man, bursting into tears herself. Now it was Hagrid's turn to awkwardly attempt to comfort a weeping person. Such was the intensity of her tears that neither of them noticed the body transform into Iliana's form when it happened.

"I killed a man, Hagrid! I've never killed anything before! And there he was, burned and bleeding, the life gone from him! I'm a murderer! I should be in prison! Why am I not in prison?"

Hagrid couldn't answer at first, he was crying again along with her. Eventually, though, he gained enough control to answer.

"Yeh're not 'orrible, Iliana. It was self defense, kill or be killed. If a hippogriff were ta kill summat who threatened its life, that wouldn't be a bad hippogriff, fer doin what it could ter protect itself. And you was protectin everyone else You-Know-Who might kill, too, if he came back. Yer not a bad person, Iliana, yer a hero!"

She cried with renewed vigor, but the cadence was still the same.

"I know it don't feel like it now, but yeh'll feel better. Yeh'll prolly never forget it, and that's a good thing, but it'll hurt less in time. You jes remember that I love yeh no matter what, ya hear? You're no monster, Iliana; trust me, I know a thing or two bout monsters."

That managed to get a chuckle out of her, at least. Hagrid grinned.

"There's my smilin young Iliana," he said tenderly. "There's my beam o' sunshine. You buck up, ya hear? Try to remember he was an evil git, and was tryin ter kill yeh, or worse. And remember that I love yeh no matter what. Never forget that, yeh hear me?"

She nodded, still sniffling, but feeling better again. The two of them sat there on the bed, Iliana leaning against the large man's comforting warmth for as long as she could.

Despite his words, Iliana had broken down at least twice more before the day was over, and though they didn't transform again, she still retreated, leaving Harry to pilot the body, by himself, down to the Great Hall. He took a moment to conceal the puffy redness under their eyes from her crying beforehand, though, knowing Malfoy would be there.

On his way to the Griffindor table, Harry could hear everyone talking loudly about him and what had happened down in the Mirror room with Quirrell. Given some of the content, he was glad Iliana had checked out again; positive as it was, it could still trigger her.

Fortunately, Dumbledore arrived moments later. The babble died away.

"Another year gone!" Dumbledore said cheerfully. "And I must trouble you with an old man's wheezing waffle before we sink our teeth into our delicious feast. What a year it has been! Hopefully your heads are all a little fuller than they were … you have the whole summer ahead to get them nice and empty before next year starts. …

"First of all, I would like to congratulate Slytherin House for winning the Quidditch cup yet again!"

Cheers erupted from the Slytherins. Everyone else was silent.

"Well done Slytherin, well done Slytherin. Second, as you are all no doubt aware, the House points are in, so I say congratulations to Griffindor House, for winning the House Cup!"

Now everyone _but_ the Slytherins cheered; the Slytherins' boos were drowned out by all the cheering.

Dumbledore then launched into a somewhat vague account of the events beneath the school, which made Harry wonder why he bothered, though it _was_ punctuated by various students chiming in with accurate facts about what had happened, such as Percy boasting that his brother Ron had gotten past McGonagall's giant chess set. He was also interested to note that even Neville standing up to them had been noted, the man saying it took just as much bravery (if not more) to stand up to your friends, and his curiosity deepened.

"And so it is with great pleasure that I award Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ronald Weasley, and Neville Longbottom special awards for services to the school!"

Stunned by both this proclamation and by the wall of ecstatic noise that hit him, Harry couldn't help letting Iliana's jaw slacken with shock. But however stunned he was, was as nothing to Neville's face. It took several groups of people working together to pry the two stunned kids off their seats and up to the front to receive their awards. Or rather, to have their pictures taken with the awards before said awards went up into a case in the trophy room.

While a part of him was elated, he was also annoyed; he could feel pressure from Iliana building, and resisted it, pushed her down for now; it wouldn't help either of them for her to surface now. He just concentrated on looking pleased as punch as the Great Hall erupted into jovial chaos.

Having almost forgotten about exam results, he was later surprised once more to have passed, despite all the trouble he'd had concentrating. Before long, all of his friends were packing, getting ready to leave; everyone but him, of course. He just watched, back in his original form again.

There were many extended, and repeated, goodbyes, as he saw his friends off outside the doors of Hogwarts, watching them board the carriages. He smiled, feeling bittersweet. His mind began to wander, but it didn't get far; his stomach fell out of his body, or so it felt, as he noticed the strange skeletal, horse-like winged creatures that pulled the carriages. In mute horror, he wondered how it was that nobody else was noticing these blank-eyed monstrosities, even when the creatures' movements should have been catching their eyes.

"Whatcha lookin at, Harry?" Hagrid said, suddenly at Harry's side.

Harry pointed at the horse things, gaping.

"Oh," said Hagrid. "Ah yeah, I figgered you'd be able ter see em now, what with everything that happened."

"You... you see them too?"

"Yup. Don't worry, Harry. They're harmless, long as yeh don't rile 'em. They're called thestrals. Only people who can see em, are people who've seen someone die. Makes me right glad so few people _can_ see em, specially after the dark times we 'ad back some twelve years back, I tell ya what."

Harry sighed, relieved that he wasn't going mad.

Ron's and Hermione's carriage was the last to leave. Just before leaving, Ron said, "You must come and stay this summer, both of you — I'll send you an owl."

"Thanks," said Harry, "I'd love to meet your family, Ron. And yours, Hermione."

His friends waved goodbye to him, and he waved back, watching them go, until he couldn't see them anymore.

"Right. Well now tha's done, Harry, welcome to yer new home. Wanna join me in a cuppa?"

"That sounds great, Hagrid."

So he followed his large friend, wishing he could take the large man by the hand, but forced to try to walk very fast to keep up with Hagrid's large stride.

 _ **Well this should be an interesting summer.**_


	5. Stones, Snakes, and House Elves

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 5"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Five: Stones, Snakes, and House Elves

Note: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note two: A little canon-y dialogue and narration in here, too. The Dobby scene in canon just has so much that's still great that works here, too. Again, I try to avoid it as much as possible.

One week. One week they had to stay in Hogwarts before being sent to spend the rest of the summer with the Weasleys. At first, Harry and the rest of the collective thought that was a ridiculously short amount of time, as they were keen on exploring the castle. But in that week, the only people in the castle besides them, Dumbledore, Hagrid, and Filch was... well, that was it, really. Even Snape had left, to who knew where. Hagrid was still busy with his gamekeeping chores mostly, Dumbledore remained as aloof as usual up in his office, and Filch had a nasty habit of following them around everywhere they went, sure they were up to no good. They occasionally got out to visit Hagrid, but mostly it was a lot of boredom in the empty Griffindor tower, unless they wanted to spend every five minutes facing Filch's wheezy accusations or dodging his cat, Mrs. Norris.

The only reason they were spending any time at all in the castle over the summer, from what Dumbledore had intimated, was because they were waiting for Nicolas Flamel to arrive. He would need a couple days to use the Philosopher's Stone to make enough gold and Elixir of Life to last him and his wife another year or two, and of course this required Zoey's presence and cooperation. Though nobody said why he was making extra, the collective knew it was in case Voldemort made Harry and the others pop their clogs.

Iliana had been gone almost that entire week, vanished Inside, hopefully recovering from the trauma of having killed in self defense. Dumbledore did come down from his office a couple times that week to ask after her and suggest that she see a mind healer over the summer, but Harry had no satisfactory answers for him, for she rarely appeared even internally.

Of all the things about that week, Iliana's disappearance was bothering Harry the most. He'd gotten so used to the body being in Iliana's form that the body having his original form again just felt weird to him. And... wrong, somehow? He worried, as he tried to get to sleep at night, that he'd been fading away and might die out, to let Iliana replace him, which he most assuredly did not want to do. But all the same, it felt weird being in a boy's body all the time again.

Pretty much the only sign they'd had all that week that Iliana was even still around was the fact that she continued to have nightmares whenever they slept. Nightmares that often woke them up in a cold sweat, making further sleep pretty much impossible.

On the sixth day, Dumbledore and Harry were sitting at the lone table in the Great Hall having breakfast (because with so few people in the castle there seemed no point to have more than one table, according to Dumbledore) when the headmaster coughed slightly to get his attention.

"Yes, sir?"

"Ah yes, Harry, I wanted to let you know, Nicolas sent an owl, and he will be here by noon at the latest. He will need an hour to set up his equipment in one of the labs in the dungeons, but he will need the Stone after that point. So I will fetch you at 1pm. Please let Zoey know to be ready to retrieve the Stone."

Harry nodded, continuing to dig into his kippers. "Yes, sir."

"Good. With that out of the way, has there been any word from Iliana?"

Harry swallowed, then shook his head. "No, sir. She keeps having nightmares, though, at night. I've been up since 4 am today because of one of them, in fact."

"Hmm. I will send some owls today, to try to speed up getting a mind healer appointment for her, in that case. She should not be hiding from her troubles, they will only get worse the more she does."

"Okay, sir. I'll continue to try to coax her out."

"Excellent."

After breakfast, Harry glumly went back up to Griffindor tower, taking a number of shortcuts so he could minimize the chance of running into Filch. When he got up there, he stared at his belongings, thinking about Iliana, about getting out of the castle in two days, and – oddly – about what he would wear when he did. He of course had Muggle clothes, if the circus tents that had been Dudley's counted as clothing. Looking at the hideous things again, he suddenly knew he didn't want to wear any of it ever again. He was free of the Dursleys, so he wanted to be free of any reminders of them. On a sudden, unexpected whim, he grabbed up all his old Muggle clothes (except his underpants), carried them downstairs in his arms, and threw them all in the fire, watching them burn. This meant he wouldn't have any Muggle clothes for the trip to the Weasleys, but he didn't care; he could Floo directly to the Burrow if he needed to, right? And from there to Diagon Alley, no doubt.

"Harry," Dumbledore said, making Harry start and turn. The headmaster was there in the Griffindor dormitory, looking into the fire at the burning clothes.

"Er..." Harry said. But the headmaster just chuckled.

"Nothing to worry about, my dear boy. If I'd been forced to wear such hideous apparel, I can imagine I'd want to burn it as well. No matter. You have your inheritance, and Gringotts can exchange wizarding money for Muggle money, so buying new Muggle clothing will pose no problem for you. The only sticking point, of course, is what you will wear to the Muggle stores. But I shall solve that now for you."

Dumbledore got out his wand and drew in the air with it, making a folded black t-shirt and folded pair of blue jeans appear on a nearby chair. Harry looked at them and felt, oddly, that they looked wrong too. But he couldn't figure out why he felt that way, so he just picked them up and smiled at Dumbledore.

"Thank you, sir. Shall I put them in my room before we go?"

"Yes. I am early anyway, and Nicolas learned patience many centuries ago besides."

Harry nodded at this and ran up to put away his new clothes in his trunk. When he got back downstairs, Dumbledore nodded.

"This way, Harry."

Harry wrinkled his nose slightly. Something had been bothering him for a long time, something he'd only become aware of now, as Dumbledore spoke; he had realized that he didn't like being called Harry.

More accurately, he'd been aware of this for some time, he just hadn't been aware of being aware of it; and no, it wasn't a Multiple thing. It was like when Al had become aware of the absurd convenience of Hagrid managing to find a dragon egg without looking for one, but not really fully _getting it_ until later.

As Dumbledore led him down to the dungeons to find Flamel, Harry thought about this new realization, wondering about its origins. Was it because he'd thought his name was Boy for so long, because of the Dursleys, that he'd actually introduced himself as Boy in kindergarten and become an instant laughingstock? He'd only heard any of the Dursleys say his real name after that incident, when he had – angry and embarrassed – demanded to know his name, and Aunt Petunia had finally told him, once she'd stopped laughing at him long enough to get it out. Dudley said it sometimes, of course. The name was associated with pain and ridicule... so was that it?

His introspection was cut short when Dumbledore announced that they were there. He let Harry in, and Harry got his first look at Nicolas Flamel.

The man was short, hardly taller than Harry, and had a full beard, but he looked no older than 40, so his resemblance to Dumbledore ended there.

"Harry," Dumbledore said, "this is my good friend Nicolas Flamel."

"Ah, you must be the Potters," Flamel said, in an accent that Harry couldn't place. Al couldn't, either.

 **But then, he's several hundred years old, so that complicates matters,** Al thought.

"Yes, that's us."

"Dumbledore tells me that one named Zoey has the Stone."

Harry nodded, looking around at the lab the man had set up. It was quite complex, like something out of an old gothic mad scientist movie, but without the Muggle technology.

"I'll see if I can get her out, then, sir."

 _Zoey?_ He inquired within.

They glowed bright white, shrinking; suddenly a 6 year old with black hair, light brown skin, and one green eye, one hazel eye was standing there, wearing a pink pinafore dress and black Mary Janes, with a pink ribbon in her hair. She was holding a blood red stone in her right hand.

"Hello Mister Flamel. Are you looking for this?" She handed it to him.

"Yes, indeed. Thank you, my dear."

Dumbledore twinkled at her. "Well best run along, dear. This will take a few hours. There's no point waiting around for that span. I will fetch you when it is time to resecure the Stone."

"Righty-o, Mister Dumbledore Sir" she said cheerfully, before literally running along out the door.

"Oy there, no running in the corridors!" a wheezy voice shouted at her as she left the room. She turned to see Mister Filch slouching quickly in her direction. "Don't think I'm afraid of whipping you just because you're a little girl, missy."

"Sorry, not my scene," she said innocently. "But maybe Madam Pince will let you whip her instead?"

As Filch gaped in red-faced astonishment at her, Zoey skipped away, humming a happy song to herself.

She decided it was a beautiful day to go outside, and so she did, spending her time hunting around the grounds for animals to coo at. She saw several rabbits, a fox, and some frogs, but none of them wanted to stick around for long. But then she spotted a grass snake by the black lake.

 _'Hello there, little snakey,'_ she said to it. _'How are you this fine afternoon?'_

The snake lifted its head and regarded her curiously. _'I am well. How are you?'_

 _'I'm good, too. Are you hunting?'_

 _'I was.'_

 _'Should I leave you be?'_

 _'Yes please.'_

 _'Okie dokie. I wish you luck!'_

 _'Thanks, strange human.'_

She watched the snake slither off into the water until she couldn't see it anymore, and went off in search of more snakes.

When Dumbledore approached Zoey later, she was sitting cross-legged on the grass, stroking a grass snake's head, appearing from a distance to be speaking to it. As he got closer, however, he thought he heard her hissing and spitting at it without drawing breath, which froze him in his tracks. He suddenly remembered Iliana having said, at the beginning of the last school year, that Alastair had been commanding the snakes. Dumbledore had wondered, then, if it had been Parseltongue, and now he was certain. This fact lent some weight to a theory of his he'd been rather hoping he was wrong about, especially given that the Potter collective had an innocent (more or less) child among them.

He started walking again, and – apparently sensing his presence at last – Zoey looked up and smiled at him.

"Is it time to put the Stone back already?"

"Yes, I'm delighted to say that Nicolas and his wife are now well prepared for another year. More, in fact. It is always best to have extras, in case of emergencies. So your new friend shall have to slither off now, I'm afraid."

"Okay, Mister Dumbledore Sir," she said. She turned to the snake and said, _'See you later, Miss Snakey.'_

 _'I hope so. You are warm, and I like warm things.'_

The child let the snake go, and got up to follow him back to the dungeons. He considered her in silence the whole way there, wondering if he should tell her about the meaning of her gift, or not. Finally, though, he decided he ought to.

"Miss Potter?"

"Yes, Mister Dumbledore Sir?"

"I am curious about something. Were you able, perchance, to understand what that snake was saying?"

"Well, yes. Can't all magical people speak with snakes?"

"No, it is a rare gift, called Parseltongue."

"Partial-tongue?"

"No, Parseltongue. With an S, not a T. And it is a gift I think you would do best to keep quiet. I do not personally have any prejudice against the gift, but many in the wizarding world consider the gift to be associated with dark magic."

 **Oh lovely, something else to worry about,** Al said.

Ignoring him, Zoey nodded at Dumbledore. "Okay, I'll keep it quiet."

Zoey was pensive the whole rest of the way back, and during the process of re-securing the Stone. Harry briefly appeared before Zoey came back out. Having secured the Stone, Flamel said his goodbyes, and Zoey went back outside to speak with her new friend.

The conversation was much more subdued after that, though; even the snake noticed.

 _'What bothers you, human?'_

 _'I just found out that being able to speak with you like this is considered bad by a lot of people, just because a lot of bad people had this ability too. It's a rare gift, the headmaster told me.'_

 _'Ah. So you must keep it a secret?'_

 _'Yes.'_

 _'Does that mean you have to withdraw the offer to let me inside the castle where it is always warm, even in the cold months?'_

 _'No. I'll keep you anyway. I'll just have to be careful. Maybe if I concentrate, I can tell the difference between this partialtongue and English.'_

She sighed, then invited the snake to crawl up and around her arm. Then she took it inside, up to their room in the Griffindor dorms, and let the snake coil around her shoulders as she packed their belongings, as they would be going to the Burrow soon. She kept the snake, which she named Aqua, with her all day long and even into bed with her, explaining to it about being a Multiple before she went to bed, just in case they switched in their sleep.

Zoey woke up the next morning surprised to find that Iliana's nightmares had felt distant, like a storm on the horizon, during the night. It was curious, and Al wondered if it was because Zoey was so bubbly. Zoey just shrugged and went down to breakfast.

The headmaster was there at the table already when she sat down.

"Ah, Miss Zoey Potter. Still with us, then? Good, good. Incidentally, my dear, you'll want to pack today, for I will be taking you to the Burrow in time for lunch today."

In between bites of her scrambled eggs, she said, "Yeah I kinda figgered. So I packed last night."

"Good, then we can leave all the sooner. Shall we leave after breakfast, then?"

"Sure. How're we getting there, Floo?"

"I think it would be more secure, actually, if I were to take you by side-along Apparition."

"What's that?"

"Apparition is disappearing from one place and instantly reappearing elsewhere."

"Oh, like teleporting?"

He chuckled. "Yes, I suppose that is the Muggle term for it. But, er... the experience is often unpleasant for beginners, and tends to cause nausea. But if you lose your breakfast, my dear, Molly will be more than happy to replace it for you."

"Molly is Ron's mum, right?"

"Correct. I call her Molly, but you would probably be best to call her Mrs. Weasley."

"Yeah, I noticed – or Al noticed, really – that you tend to call adults by their first names, even other professors, and with kids it's a mix of first names and Mr/Miss Whatever, or something like 'my dear boy.' Al thinks it's weird, and says that the adults look either offended or exasperated depending on how used to it they are. Like, he's not sure but he thinks it's some kind of rule you're breaking."

"Ah, yes. Well I hope you all will forgive an old man his eccentricities," he said, twinkling at them before going back to his bacon.

 **Sounds to me like another way of saying 'I'm Dumbledore, muthafuckas, I do what I waaant.'**

Zoey giggled at this. Dumbledore looked curiously at her, apparently cluing into the fact she wasn't giggling at him.

"Am I to assume that Alastair has said something amusing to you?"

"Yeah. But it was a little rude."

He twinkled at them again, to which Al replied with an image of himself rolling his eyes. She snorted into her pudding at this.

After breakfast, Dumbledore helped Zoey get their trunk downstairs by calling a house elf to do it. Zoey stared in amazement at the elf, with its large head, huge eyes, and batlike ears for the brief time that it was there. When it left, she looked up at Dumbledore.

"What was that?"

"That was a house elf. They are magical creatures that are servants for us. Hogwarts is home to over 100 of them. They clean, cook, tend the fires, make the beds, and other things besides."

"Really? So why do we need Mr. Filch?"

"Ah. As to that, the mark of a good house elf is that it is never seen unless summoned, or unless you were to find your way into the kitchens. So we need Mr. Filch for messes in places and times that elves cannot do it, as well as to maintain order in the corridors."

"Al wants to know why, if that's the case, you need someone who can't do magic for that job. He says it would be better to have a fully qualified wizard do it."

"Mr. Filch is more than capable."

Zoey's face contorted into a scowl, which was a strange thing to see on her face. "What a load of rubbish. That's not an answer. I mean, I have nothing against the man, it's just that he's obviously miserable here, surrounded by constant reminders of his perceived inadequacy. It's no bloody wonder he hates the students."

"Ah. Alastair, I presume?"

Zoey's face raised an eyebrow at the man. "Yes."

"Well, now is not the time to discuss it, my dear boy. I-"

"Don't call me 'boy,'" Al-Zoey interrupted. "That term has a lot of baggage for us, it's what the Dursleys called us. Harry didn't even know his real name until kindergarten."

"Ah. I apologize, Alastair. I was unaware of that. I will endeavor to remember not to do it again. Ah, here come the carriages."

Zoey's face lost Al's annoyed expression at once as she beamed. "HORSIES!" she shouted, pointing at the thestrals pulling the carriage. "Horsies horsies horsies HORSIES!"

"Thestrals, my dear; they're thestrals."

"Yeah I know, Hagrid said so already. But they're also horsies!"

Dumbledore chuckled at that. "I suppose they are, at that."

"Why're we getting in the carriage if we're using side along teleportation?"

"Apparition, my dear. Hagrid had this one ready already because I had originally planned to use the Floo at the Three Broomsticks, so I wouldn't need to go to the trouble of connecting the castle to the Floo network, but then I remembered that Voldemort had been here recently, and decided it was more secure to do side along Apparition. But it seems that your unexpected readiness caused me to forget to inform Hagrid to unhitch the thestrals, so here they came as originally scheduled. We may as well use them, since they are here. It _is_ rather a lengthy walk to the gates, after all, and I am not as young as I used to be."

Zoey nodded at this and climbed into the carriage. Dumbledore got in behind her, and the two thestrals began heading down at a light canter to the gates. It wasn't until they got there that Dumbledore spoke, giving a command to them to stop, which they did. They got out, got Zoey's trunk out, and Dumbledore sent the thestrals back to Hagrid.

"I will send your trunk along ahead of us, it will be easier this way."

She nodded. He pointed his wand at the trunk, and it vanished.

"Take my arm now, dear. And prepare yourself."

She did, and soon she felt like she was being squeezed through a dark rubber tube, before suddenly appearing in a grassy field. She felt a little woozy, but managed to keep her breakfast down. She still had to lean against Dumbledore, though.

When Zoey regained her composure, she looked up at the sight of a very tall house that looked like a barn had been added to multiple times until it was a tall structure that was plainly being held up by magic.

"Oh. My. Goodness!" she said, her eyes wide. She began to laugh delightedly at it.

"Welcome to the Burrow, Miss Potter."

They began walking toward it. They'd barely begun when a rubenesque woman with flaming red hair came bustling toward them from the door.

"Mrs. Weasley?" Zoey asked Dumbledore.

"Yes, that is Molly Weasley. Hello, Molly!" he said to the woman, who had gotten within earshot.

"Dumbledore! And..." she looked at Zoey curiously. "Who is this?"

"This is one of the Potters. Her name is Zoey. Zoey Potter, meet Molly Weasley."

Zoey held out her hand. Mrs. Weasley took it, still looking confused. "One of the... OH! Yes, she has the... well..." she trailed off, her eyes flicking to the scar that was always on their forehead no matter who was Out, "and I remember you explaining it to me, Albus. Several people in one body, and the body changes form from some of the switches, right?"

"Yes, ma'am. It is very nice to meet you at last. Ron talks about you a lot."

"Thank you, dear. He talks of you a lot too. Well, I don't think he's mentioned you in particular, but he's mentioned Harry, Alastair, and Iliana. Er... how many of you are there, anyway? If it's not rude to ask."

"It's fine. So far, it's just me, Harry, Iliana, Alastair, and Tier."

"Tea-air?"

"It's German," Zoey explained. "Means 'beast, animal.' He's a little feral, but nice."

"Ah. So just the five of you, then?"

"So far as we know."

"Two girls and three boys, then?"

Something in their shared mental space twinged at that, but Zoey didn't know what it meant, so she just replied, "S'far's we know, ma'am."

Mrs. Weasley tut-tutted. "No more of this 'ma'am,' business please, dear. Just call me Mrs. Weasley, if you call me anything at all."

"Okie dokie then."

Dumbledore coughed slightly to get their attention.

"Sorry to interrupt, Molly m'dear, but I have matters to attend to back in Hogsmeade, so I shall have to leave you for now. Enjoy your summer, Zoey, Everyone."

Mrs. Weasley and Zoey said their goodbyes to the man, who tipped his hat before disappearing with a small pop, and soon Zoey was following Mrs. Weasley into the house.

"Iliana! Is that-" Ron shouted, falling short in both speech and momentum as he saw Zoey. Recovering quickly, he smiled and said, "Hey there, Titchy."

"Ronald, don't be rude to the poor dear."

"S'okay, Mrs. Weasley." She turned to Ron, punching him so hard in the arm that he exclaimed in pain. "Right back atcha, Lanky."

"Ah, do our ears deceive us?" said one of the twins, who were coming down the stairs. "Are those the dulcet tones of our favorite troublemaking Potter, the esteemed Zoey Potter?"

She blushed, and exaggerated looking embarrassed. "Flattery will get you everywhere. Well, maybe not _everywhere_."

The twins, to everyone's surprise, turned beet red. Molly blinked, then laughed.

"Well, now I've seen everything." She shook her head, then turned to Zoey. "Did Dumbledore bring you along by side along Apparition? Were you sick in the grass, dearie?"

"He did, but I'm fine. I got a little woozy, but everything's still in there."

"All the same, dearie, from what I've heard of those relatives of yours, I'd feel better if you ate something else."

"Well, maybe a biscuit, if you have one."

Mrs. Weasley summoned the biscuit tin with her wand. "There you go, dearie."

"Do we get biscuits, too?" asked the twins and Ron.

"No. You had some already, and knowing you, you'd eat yourself sick if I let you."

"Ah well," said Fred. "Doesn't hurt to ask."

Ron started to lead Zoey up to his room, but Mrs. Weasley stopped him.

"No, Ron; I don't feel comfortable letting her sleep in your room. She can sleep in Ginny's room."

"Mom! She's 6! What do you think I am, some kind of sicko? Besides which, they already sleep in our room at school."

"Yes. With three other boys. I don't understand why Dumbledore allows it, honestly."

"Where're they supposed to sleep? There's two boys in their collective, they can't use the girl's dormitory."

"They should have their own room, if that's the case."

"If it'll help, I can bring Harry back."

"Hmm... but what about Iliana, dear?"

"She's been in hiding ever since she killed Quirrell in self defense."

Molly looked concerned again. "Yes... yes I heard about that. Of course Dumbledore explained it all in an owl, the poor dear. I hope something can be done for her. But no, dear, you can stay if you want; there's no need to switch on our account. If nothing else, you can always kip on the sofa."

"Well can she at least come up and _see_ my room without me getting the third degree?"

"Yes yes, just leave the door open."

Ron sighed and rolled his eyes, leading Zoey upstairs. She followed along behind, her eyes going every which way, taking in everything she could.

"Sorry about Mum back there. Honestly, of all the daft things... I don't know what her problem is. Anyway, here's my room."

"Ouch," she said, shielding her eyes from the glare of all his myriad neon orange Chudley Cannons posters. "Okie dokie, I don't think I'm gonna go in there, it's painfully orange in there. Gah..." she backed away carefully, then turned about and went around the corner.

"Sorry, Ron. Maybe Harry or Al can look at it later. But my head still hurts from all the orange."

Ron blushed. "Sorry about that, mate. I guess it _is_ a bit much. Wanna go outside? Mum says we're to stay on the property, because some people from the ministry were here the other day putting up wards for you lot, but there's plenty to do out there."

"Alrighty. But I think I'm gonna retire, let Harry out."

"Ah, okay. Later, then?"

"Later for sure. Hold on a moment, gonna go to the loo first."

Zoey ran into the loo, closing the door, and turned the tap on. Then she said, in Parseltongue, _'Come out, Aqua. I have to switch, and it's best if you're not coiling around me at the time, just in case.'_

 _'If you say so, human.'_

Once the snake was waiting on the bathroom sink, she glowed, grew, and became Harry.

 _'Ah, you smell different, but similar. So she wasn't exaggerating.'_

 _'Yeah,'_ said Harry.

 _'May I curl around you again?'_ she asked.

 _'Yeah, go on.'_

 _'Ah, so warm.'_

When Harry came back out, he found Ron again.

"Let me see your room, Ron; maybe I'll have a better time of it than Zoey."

As it turned out, Harry had no problem with Ron's room. He could see where it could cause others problems, but as for him, he had no problem of it. After getting a good look around, they decided to go outside and play some Quidditch, so Harry grabbed his broom and headed downstairs with Ron.

On their way out the door, Mrs. Weasley spotted them.

"Is that you, Harry?"

"Hi Mrs. Weasley. Yes, it's me."

"Glad to see you again. You two going outside, then?"

"Yeah, Mum. Gonna play some Quidditch."

"Ah, is that so little brother? Well wait for us, and we'll come too," George said.

"The more the merrier."

"Where's Ginny? Maybe she can join us, too."

"I would, but she'd take one look at you and run off, mate. She fancies you, and anyone she fancies makes her very nervous."

Harry blushed. "Ah. Anyone else available to join in?"

"Nope," said Fred. "Charlie and Bill live abroad, and perfect Percy is too busy with whatever it is he does in his room to condescend spending time with us plebes."

"I guess we'll just have to make do."

It wasn't easy, as it turned out, to play Quidditch with just four people, so they ended up giving up and just practiced tossing the Quaffle around and catching it, going for ever more difficult passes and laughing at one another whenever they failed.

Later that day, as they headed back for dinner, they saw Mr. Weasley Apparate in at a distance some ways away, so they waited for him to walk the rest of the way to the door.

"Hey Dad," Fred said. "Look, it's Harry. Harry Potter!"

"Ah yes, so it is. Good to meet you, Harry," he said, holding out his hand. Harry took it with a resigned feeling.

They went in and sat down around the dinner table. As they waited to be served, Mr. Weasley looked straight at Harry and asked him to explain how airplanes stay up in the air. Harry blinked, a bit bemused, but answered.

"I'm not sure, but there's some scientific principle called lift, where if you shape the wings a certain way, it does something with air pressure that pushes the plane into the sky."

"Amazing! I wonder how they discovered that?"

"No idea."

"And what about this ekeltricity?"

"Electricity. That's from..." he strained his memory, concentrating. "Well, matter is made of these tiny little things called atoms, and the atoms are made of smaller bits called protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons make a nucleus, and electrons buzz around it like planets around the sun. But they can move from one atom to another, the electrons. Magnets do that a lot. I'm not sure how the magnets make the electrons move, but they're part of the electric generators, and that electric power makes lights and stuff work."

"Absolutely fascinating. And what about-"

"Arthur, don't pester him, it's dinnertime."

"Sorry, Molly dear."

 **Sheesh. Didn't Ron say this guy works in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts office at the ministry?** Al commented internally. **You'd think he'd know this stuff already.**

After he'd gotten a solid amount of food into his belly, Harry turned to Mr. Weasley again.

"Did you take Muggle Studies class in Hogwarts?"

"Well yes, of course. I work with Muggles, so an O.W.L. in Muggle Studies is required. Why do you ask?"

 **Seriously? Must be a shit class, then,** Al said to Harry.

"Oh. Just curious, Mr. Weasley."

As they went back to eating, Harry made a mental note to get Mr. Weasley a book or two about some Muggle science stuff for him for Christmas.

 **From the kid's section, would be best.**

Summer at the Weasley's was a lot of fun. Ron (and the twins, when they weren't shut in their rooms making explosions) always found ways to have fun, because boredom in the Weasley household was a surefire way to get set doing chores. But even some of the chores were fun, like de-gnoming. Harry felt bad tossing the grubby little potato-shaped gnomes at first, but they proved to be stupid and mean, so he quickly lost sympathy for them.

Sure enough, Ginny turned out to flee the room if Harry turned up unexpectedly, and turned red and got clumsy other times when he was in the room. Harry pretended not to notice, even while Al wanted to roll his eyes, and Zoey giggled somewhere deep Inside.

Going to bed the first night in Ron's room had been met with an unexpected complication. Harry had been on autopilot, his mind wandering, and only when Ron shouted "Oy! What the...?" did Harry notice he had been about to change into one of Iliana's nightgowns. He put it away, but strangely he didn't feel embarrassed by the mistake, just annoyed.

Even with Iliana still hiding, and Mr. Weasley's constant questions about Muggle technology, it was the best summer he'd ever had. (Yes, even counting the previous one spent in Diagon Alley and The Leaky Cauldron.) And it was proving to get better, for by the week before his birthday they finalized plans for Hermione to come to his first ever birthday party. Though he'd been free of the Dursleys the summer before, and Hagrid had gotten him a cake and taken him out for ice cream and given him presents, it hadn't been a party; it takes more than two people to have a party, after all. So Harry was very excited for the upcoming birthday.

The next morning, however, something happened that put a slight damper on his excitement. He had gotten an owl from Dumbledore telling him of Iliana's first appointment with a mind healer, to happen two days before his birthday, with a man called Healer Young. He sighed, but accepted this. Iliana needed to get better, after all, and he missed her terribly. So he sent the owl back with a quick scribbled note relaying his understanding.

On the night before the appointment, Harry went to bed as usual. Perhaps sparked by the impending appointment, Iliana's nightmares – which had spent most of the weeks at the Burrow barely noticeable to Harry – came back in full force. They were right in the middle of one about an angry zombie Quirrell grabbing their arms and shaking them, screaming accusations at them, when they woke up screaming. A hand immediately clapped over their mouth, Iliana's mouth (for they had apparently transformed in their sleep), cutting off the scream quickly. Ron grunted, but did not wake up.

Panicking, struggling against the hands holding her down, Iliana began to cry. Not only was she terrified that someone was in her room holding her down, but she was also terrified that Dumbledore had been wrong, that they still had their mother's protection, that she would kill someone else.

 _'What was that?'_ she heard Zoey's pet snake say from inside her bedclothes. _'Human, what is wrong?'_ she asked, but of course Iliana could not answer. _'I will bite anyone who hurts you, though I don't think that will do much more than annoy them.'_

"Miss Potter will please settle down, Miss. Dobby is not meaning Miss no harm. Dobby is a good elf. Please, Miss," said the high-pitched voice. "Please be settling down and be quiet. Dobby is promising you is not to be harmed. In fact, Dobby is here to warn Miss of danger coming to Hogwarts!"

Though unsure whether to believe the voice or not, Iliana calmed down just enough to remember TV shows they'd seen that showed it was a good idea to comply even if your kidnapper meant you harm, at least for a little while.

"Does Miss Potter promise to be quiet please for Dobby to speaks with her?"

Iliana nodded. A part of her was very curious how Ron was sleeping through Dobby's high-pitched voice, even though the elf was whispering. For she now recognized that he was a house elf.

"Good. Dobby is letting go now, Miss, but Dobby is ready to quiet Miss again if Miss screams again."

And with that, he let go of her. She immediately pushed away from him, squeezing herself as tight to the wall as she could. Aqua, the snake, stuck her head out of Iliana's nightgown (as Harry's pajamas had transformed along with the body) and sniffed the air with wary curiosity.

 _'You are tense and I smell fear on you. Is that green creature with the large ears the source of your fear?'_

Iliana didn't want to find out what Dobby would say if she spoke Parseltongue around him, so she just started stroking the snake's head.

 _'I shall take that as a no, then,'_ Aqua replied, and settled back inside Iliana's nightgown.

"Oh Miss," Dobby said sadly. "Dobby is so very sad that Miss is scared. Dobby is hoping Miss is not being scared, but Dobby is prepared for Miss being scared, for Dobby heard tell of Miss being very scared after she is getting away from the bad dark wizard who is trying to take the Philosopher's Stone."

 **I guess they never taught this fellow about the past tense, eh?** Al commented to Iliana, but she wasn't in the mood for levity.

"Shut up!" she responded to Al, aloud.

Dobby jerked back, his lip quivering, his large wet eyes watering.

"Not you, Dobby. Sorry, I was talking to Al. But... you probably don't know what I mean by that, do you?"

Dobby looked relieved by this.

"Oh no, Miss, not at all. Dobby is knowing all about your condition, Miss. Dobby is hearing of it from several sources. Dobby is knowing all about the Potters, about Misses Iliana and Zoey, and of Harry Potter, and of Alastair Potter. Dobby is even knowing of one who people is calling Tier."

"Who'd you hear all this from, Dobby?"

"From other house elves, mainly. They is also saying how great the Potters is, how the Potters is defeating even You-Know-Who. They speaks of your bravery, too. Such an honor it is, Miss Iliana Potter, to be meeting you."

Iliana wanted to argue with him on some of those points, but got the impression that it would be a waste of time, so instead, she just said, "You said something about danger coming to Hogwarts?"

Dobby nodded so hard his ears flapped.

"Yes, Miss. Dobby has come to tell you, Miss. It is difficult, Miss. Dobby wonders where to begin?"

"Why don't you sit down?" she said politely, pointing at the bed in front of her.

To her horror, Dobby burst into very noisy tears.

"S-sit down!" he wailed. "Never … never ever …"

"I'm sorry," she whispered, "I didn't mean to offend you or anything —"

"Offend Dobby!" choked the elf. "Dobby has never been asked to sit down by a witch or wizard — like an equal —"

Iliana, trying to say "Shh!" and look comforting at the same time, ushered Dobby into a sitting position on the bed where he sat hiccoughing, looking like a large and very ugly doll. At last he managed to control himself, and sat with his great eyes fixed on Iliana in an expression of watery adoration.

"You can't have met many decent wizards," she said, trying to cheer him up.

Dobby shook his head. Then, without warning, he leapt up and started banging his head furiously on the window, shouting, "Bad Dobby! Bad Dobby!"

"Don't — what are you doing?" Iliana hissed, springing up and pulling Dobby back onto the bed. "You'll wake Ron!"

 **He must sleep like the dead, to sleep through this racket.**

"Not to worry, Miss. Dobby is putting a silencing bubble around the two of us. Your weezy will not wake, he is not hearing us."

"Then why'd you-"

"Dobby is having very sensitive ears, Miss," he said, pointing at his large, batlike ears.

"Ah, that explains it."

"Anyway, Miss... Dobby had to punish himself, Miss," said the elf, who had gone slightly cross-eyed. "Dobby almost spoke ill of his family, Miss. …"

"Your family?" This time it was Harry that had spoken, using Iliana's voice. Dobby did not, of course, notice.

"The wizard family Dobby serves, Miss. … Dobby is a house-elf — bound to serve one house and one family forever. …"

Harry decided it would be too complicated to explain to Dobby that he was talking to Harry now, when they were still in Iliana's body, especially since that could change at any moment. And anyway, Iliana was still present, listening raptly, so he let the elf continue to think he was speaking only to her.

"I've seen house elves before, at the school," Harry said. "Do your family know you're here?" he asked curiously.

Dobby shuddered.

"Oh, no, Miss, no … Dobby will have to punish himself most grievously for coming to see you, Miss. Dobby will have to shut his ears in the oven door for this. If they ever knew, Miss —"

"But won't they notice if you shut your ears in the oven door?"

"Dobby doubts it, Miss. Dobby is always having to punish himself for something, Miss. They lets Dobby get on with it, Miss. Sometimes they reminds me to do extra punishments. …"

"But why don't you leave? Escape?"

"A house-elf must be set free, Miss. And the family will never set Dobby free … Dobby will serve the family until he dies, Miss. …"

Harry stared.

"You're a _slave_ ," he said. "Holy shit... This makes the Dursleys sound almost human. Can't anyone help you? Can't I?"

Almost at once, Harry wished he hadn't spoken. Dobby dissolved again into wails of gratitude. Despite what Dobby had said, he and Iliana couldn't help but turn to look at Ron, who was still fast asleep.

"Iliana Potter asks if she can help Dobby … Dobby has heard of your greatness, Sirs and Misses, but of your goodness, Dobby never knew. …"

Harry, who was feeling distinctly hot in the face, said, "Whatever you've heard about our greatness is a load of rubbish. We're not even top of my year at Hogwarts; that's Hermione."

"Iliana Potter is humble and modest," said Dobby reverently, his orb-like eyes aglow. "Iliana Potter speaks not of her triumph over He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named —"

"Voldemort?" said Harry without thinking.

Dobby clapped his hands over his bat ears and moaned, "Ah, speak not the name, Miss! Speak not the name!"

"Sorry," said Harry quickly. "I know lots of people don't like it. Ron complains about it all the time. But it's just a name, isn't it? It doesn't even sound like a real name. I bet he made it up."

"Miss is..." Dobby looked thoughtful, as though weighing whether he could speak or not. "Miss may possibly be... may possibly be not exactly totally on the inc-" he gritted his teeth, his whole body tensing, then started bashing his head against the bedside table. In a panic, Harry and Iliana both tried grabbing him, and ended up nearly knocking him over instead, almost falling out of bed themselves.

"Thank you, Miss. Dobby is almost saying too much."

"It's okay, Dobby. I understand it's difficult for you."

Dobby nodded. Harry opened his mouth to ask a question, but Dobby beat him to speaking.

"Dobby heard tell," he said hoarsely, "that Harry and Iliana Potter met the Dark Lord for a second time, just weeks ago … that the Potters escaped yet again."

Harry nodded and Dobby's eyes suddenly shone with tears.

"Ah, Miss," he gasped, dabbing his face with a corner of the grubby pillowcase he was wearing. "The Potters is valiant and bold! They has braved so many dangers already! But Dobby has come to protect the Potters, to warn them, even if he does have to shut his ears in the oven door later. … for Harry and Iliana Potter and the others must not go back to Hogwarts."

There was a silence broken only by Ron's grunting snores in the other bed.

"W-what?" Harry stammered. "But I've got to go back — term starts on September first. I belong here, in this world — the wizarding world — and at Hogwarts."

"No, no, no," squeaked Dobby, shaking his head so hard his ears flapped. "The Potters must stay where they is safe. They is too great, too good, to lose. If the Potters go back to Hogwarts, they will be in mortal danger."

"Why?" said Harry in surprise.

"There is a plot, Iliana Potter. A plot to make most terrible things happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this year," whispered Dobby, suddenly trembling all over. "Dobby has known it for months, Miss. Iliana Potter and the others must not put themselves in peril. They is too important, Miss!"

"What terrible things?" said Harry at once. "Who's plotting them?"

Dobby made a funny choking noise and then banged his head frantically against the wall.

"All right!" cried Harry, grabbing the elf's arm to stop him. "You can't tell me. I understand. But why are you warning me?" A sudden, unpleasant thought struck him. "Hang on — this hasn't got anything to do with Vol — sorry — with You-Know-Who, has it? You could just shake or nod," he added hastily as Dobby's head tilted worryingly close to the wall again.

Slowly, Dobby shook his head.

"Not — not He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Miss —"

But Dobby's eyes were wide and he seemed to be trying to give Harry a hint.

"You seemed to be agreeing when I said his name sounded made up. Was he known by another name before?"

Dobby said nothing, and didn't move, which said everything.

"Do you know his previous name?"

Again, another significant silence from the elf.

"But you can't tell us?"

"Oh Miss, would that Dobby could, Miss!"

"I understand. Is his previous name known to many?"

At this, Dobby tensed up, wringing his hands.

"Okay, you can't tell me. Got it. Lemme think..." but he was out of questions.

 **Ask him if Moldywart is foreign.**

"Was... was You-Know-Who born on mainland Europe?"

"Dobby-"

Ron gave such a loud snore that both of them froze. Dobby regarded Ron, and though Ron appeared to be going back to sleep, he looked panicked.

"Dobby is sorry, Miss," he whispered, "but Miss's Weezy is waking up. Miss must promise Dobby she is not going to Hogwarts! It is much too dangerous! You need to be going back to the Dursleys, Miss, where Miss is safe!"

"Can't, Dobby. I no longer live with them. It's not safe there anymore. And it wasn't really very safe there to begin with. The Dursleys are horrible people, they barely fed me, my bedroom was a cupboard under the stairs, they worked me half to death, and I had no friends until I came to Hogwarts. Even if you told me the only way to avoid dying this coming Thursday from a painful death was going back to them, I wouldn't go back, even if there was any point. I'd rather die than abandon the wizarding world and my friends."

Dobby's look of horror intensified the more he spoke. "What?" Dobby said, struggling to whisper, but his voice rising sharply into almost the dog-whistle range. "Why is Miss not staying with Miss's family anymore?" The panic in his squeakier and squeakier voice was clearly climbing, and fast. He jumped up, crying and moaning and pulling on his ears, as he ran around the room.

"Miss is not safe! Miss is not safe! No no No No NOOooooOOooo... this is not happening, this is can't be happening, Dobby can't be failing, NONONONONONO..."

"Uhhhh," Ron moaned. "take the kettle off the fire, mate..."

"Dobby, quiet down!"

 _'Shall I bite him_ _ **now**_ _?'_ Aqua asked peevishly, slithering out of Iliana's nightgown entirely.

 _'No! No biting!'_ Harry commanded her, not even noticing or caring he was using Parseltongue.

Dobby began bashing his head against the wall, tears falling from his eyes.

"Stop it!" Iliana had taken control again and was pleading with him, trying to pull him away from the wall. "Stop hurting yourself!"

"DOBBYISFAILINGDOBBYISFAILINGDOBBYISFAILIIIIIINNNNGGGG!"

With a pronounced grunt, Ron woke up. He took in the strange scene before him for a split second – the self-harming elf, Iliana trying to stop him, and an annoyed snake slithering off the bed fast as it could – before shouting and falling backwards out of bed, tangled up in his sheets, cussing fit to make a sailor blush.

By this point, Dobby was wailing at the top of his lungs, so much water coming from his eyes that you could've filled a Thermos with his tears thrice over, still banging his head against the wall, which had set the ghoul in the attic off, moaning and clanking up a storm. Iliana was hardly surprised when Mr. and Mrs. Weasley and the rest of the Weasleys came running to see what all the ruckus was about, the two adults with their wands out, looking sure there was danger... until they gaped in bewilderment at Dobby banging about, Iliana (whom the adults had not met yet) trying to pull him from the wall, and Ron trapped in his bedding, his language getting more and more foul with every passing second.

"What in blazes...?" Mr. Weasley asked weakly, having no effect on the chaos before him.

It wasn't until Mrs. Weasley snapped out of her astonishment and shouted at the top of her voice, that Dobby stopped, going still as stone. This abrupt stop took Iliana off-guard, and she fell over backwards onto Ron's bed.

Dobby turned slowly towards Mrs. Weasley, his panic-stricken eyes quivering.

CRACK! The room fell into fresh chaos at Dobby's sudden Disapparition, until once more Mrs. Weasley restored order.

It took a solid hour, once they'd extricated Ron from his sheets, for Iliana to relay the parts of the night the others had missed. When she was done, everyone stared at her for a moment, then at each other.

"Well," Mrs. Weasley said. "I don't know what to think, so I'm going to make some tea and then send Dumbledore an owl about all this. I suggest you send one too, Iliana; yours should be more accurate."

Without another word, she hurried off to the kitchen. Everyone else followed her, sitting around the table. Everyone but Iliana, however; she couldn't sit still, so she insisted on helping Mrs. Weasley, who set her to fetching cups and saucers for everyone.

"Well that was certainly a night I'll never forget," said Ron.

 _Neither will I,_ Iliana thought. _Neither will I._

Unable to sleep again, Iliana wrote a letter to Dumbledore about the incident, and sent Hedwig off to deliver it for her. Then she carefully went around the house hissing for Aqua, finally finding the snake in the loo, drinking out of the toilet. Luckily, it had not gone in all the way, and was quite dry when it slithered back around her arm. She went back to bed, even though she couldn't sleep, and just stared at the ceiling, waiting for her appointment later in the day.


	6. Snakes and Other Slithering Things

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 6"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Six: Snakes and other slithering things

Note: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

In all the chaos, Mrs. Weasley had forgotten to be uncomfortable with a girl sleeping in one of her boy's rooms, but when Iliana came downstairs that morning for breakfast, her appearance seemed to remind the Weasley matriarch of it.

"Iliana, dear, are you sure you're comfortable sleeping in the same room as a boy?"

"It's fine, Mrs. Weasley. Ron is a gentleman, despite all evidence to the contrary at times. Dumbledore was uncomfortable with me being in a boy's dormitory too, at first, but like I told him, I can take care of myself. Any boy tries anything they shouldn't, I'll hex their heads on backwards. Or I would, if I knew that particular hex."

"Well if you insist, dear."

Aqua slithered out of Iliana's school robes and onto the table, sniffing around for something she could eat. When she found nothing, she said, _'Going out to hunt,'_ and slithered off.

"Why are you wearing your school uniform, dear?"

"Oh, uh... our normal daywear was Dudley's old clothes, which fit even Al like a circus tent. Harry threw them away in the fire in a fit of pique. Dumbledore gave Harry a T-shirt and jeans to wear, but they're in the wash at present. And though we got my nightgowns from an owl order service, we didn't think to get any other clothes."

"Well when is your appointment? Maybe we can squeeze in a store run before or after."

"I dunno, Mrs. Weasley... do we have time to go all the way to Diagon Alley? I'd have to get some more gold out of our vault for that."

"Ah, excellent point, dearie. Well, we can do that tomorrow, since the day after tomorrow is your birthday. We need to get everyone's school things, and school owls should be coming in today."

"Sounds good. By the way, the appointment is at 1pm today, and he'll be coming here with Dumbledore, so the letter said."

Mrs. Weasley nodded, almost finished with making breakfast. She was about to respond when the rest of the Weasley kids came down for breakfast. Iliana noted that Ginny sat down right next to her without reacting at all. She supposed that Ginny only fancied Harry, not her. Iliana decided not to tell Ginny that Harry was just as present as he would be in his own form of the body, though in the background of their shared brain at present.

"Hey there Il," Ginny said.

Iliana grimaced. "Please don't call me that. Or Illy, or Liana. I'm Iliana."

Ginny blushed. "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. Just wanted to nip that in the bud, was all." Her grimace became a smile, and Ginny relaxed. "Though I suppose if you want to call me a nickname, I wouldn't mind 'Lee.'"

"Ah," said Fred, leaning in her direction, "let me just move Leeward, in that case."

She blushed, and pushed him away from her. When that didn't work, she took a page from Zoey's book and punched him in the arm.

"Alright, alright, I know when I'm defeated," he said, holding his hands up placatingly.

As Mrs. Weasley had predicted, the school owls came that day with their booklists, which meant a trip to Diagon Alley would be imminent; pretty much perfect timing, that. Iliana wondered if Dumbledore had timed it that way on purpose.

It was tense, waiting for the mind healer to arrive. Iliana barely ate anything for breakfast _or_ lunch, and couldn't focus on anything, so she ended up just laying down on the bed in Ron's room that she slept on, trying to distract herself from the appointment that day by wondering how long it would be before Mrs. Weasley tried to convince her to kip on a camp bed in the living room. Time seemed to both creep by like a snail, and zip along like Roadrunner simultaneously, somehow.

At last, Mrs. Weasley called her down, for Dumbledore and Healer Young had arrived. With a sensation in her stomach like something wriggly trying to free itself, she went down to face her doom.

"Ah, Iliana, long time no see my dear," Dumbledore said fondly. "I would like to introduce you to Healer Young. Iliana, Healer Yonas Young. Healer Young, Iliana Evanna Potter."

Healer Young was... old. He looked about 60 years old, though she wasn't sure how old he really was; wizards and witches seemed to be a lot longer lived than Muggles, and tended to look younger. She'd heard things that suggested Dumbledore was over 100 years old, but despite looking like the very stereotype of a wizard, he also seemed no older to her than his mid to late 70's.

She took in the rest of Healer Young's appearance. His long white hair was pulled back in a ponytail, his white mustache was curly almost like a handlebar mustache. He had a kind face, too, and kind eyes, which were a dark blue. Next to Dumbledore's canary yellow robes with bright blue stars, his own magenta robes looked mild.

Iliana felt Alastair looking into the man's eyes. She knew what he was doing; none of them had ever mentioned it before, but Al could see things in people's eyes that they tried to hide. It wasn't like mind-reading, more like heart-reading; he could tell if they meant Harry and company harm or not. He didn't always trust it, especially as it had never really worked with Dumbledore for some reason (nor with Quirrell or Snape), but it was a good starting point. Al seemed to like what he saw in the man, for he retreated to the background of their shared brain with satisfaction.

Healer Young held out his hand for her, and she shook it.

"Nice to meet you, Iliana."

"Hi," she said without enthusiasm.

 **You know, Dumbledore never really explained this whole "mind healer" thing** , Al pointed out to her.

"So what _is_ a mind healer, anyway? Is that like a psychiatrist or psychologist?"

"If I understand the Muggle terms properly – which I assure you I do," Healer Young said jovially, "more like a psychiatrist than a psychologist, insofar as I have a Healer's certification and work at St. Mungo's in the Mind Healing ward. It includes everything from spell damage that causes mental injury, to non-magical complaints of the mind. I personally specialize in helping with post traumatic stress, as well as having an interest in... well, _unusual_ psychology. What is normally referred to as abnormal psychology, but I don't like that term."

"Oh," she said, unsure what to think of that.

Healer Young turned to Dumbledore. "Were they given Calming Draught after the incident?"

"They were out cold for several days after the incident, but when Iliana awoke screaming and crying, Madam Pomfrey gave her both a Calming Draught and a Dreamless Sleep."

Iliana felt her face go hot as they discussed her like this.

"Well that's good. That will help. Calming Draught delivered in a timely fashion tends to minimize the chance of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

"That sounds like a Muggle term," Iliana said. "Did you study Muggle psychology?"

"Yes. A lot of Healers don't, as wizards have been doing Mind Healing for centuries and Muggle psychology and psychiatry are very new in comparison, but I do. The Muggles may have been late to the game, but they've made amazing discoveries in a short span of time.

"Anyway," he continued, "I'm sorry it took so long for us to meet, but I was on vacation until recently, and Professor Dumbledore wasn't satisfied with any other Mind Healer. They all either felt unqualified to help someone with your unique condition, or they had preconceived notions about your condition. I have worked with people with various forms of Multiplicity before. Some collectives are unhealthy, but others function quite well and may even function better than if they were singletons. And since I oppose integration as the murder of a sentient being, you need not worry about that. But if you ever feel you wish to go that direction, I would be willing to refer you to professionals who could help with that."

"Integration? Does that mean... what does that mean?"

"Come, let's find somewhere private. These sessions are meant to be confidential, after all."

"Okay."

Soon, they were sitting in the Weasley's living room, Healer Young having cast more privacy spells than any of the Potter collective knew existed, Dumbledore having gone off to speak with Mrs. Weasley about something.

"There, now we won't be overheard or spied upon, even unintentionally. So, to answer your question, having multiple sentient minds in the same body is not common. It isn't nearly as rare as many people think, since most Multiples have learned very quickly to hide their condition, even before they know what's going on. If it hadn't been for your transformations, in fact, I doubt you'd even be aware of being any different from others."

"Yeah. Harry used to think me and Al were just different aspects of his personality. He thought everyone thought like that. The apparent mood swings resulting from our different reactions to the same stimuli, depending on who was at the front... that confused him a lot, though. But we have a common memory, so before the transformations, he just thought it was him all the time, even when he would feel like a powerless observer of his body's actions."

"I don't doubt it. Your form of the condition is interesting. I've seen the like before, though there isn't a term for it yet, as far as I know. But it is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between full MPD and single-mindedness."

She stared at him, not really knowing what to say.

"But of course, fascinating as all that is, it's not what we're here for. Feel free to ask questions about it, though, if you want. I don't mind going off on a tangent, when it's educational, or if you're feeling overwhelmed by other things."

"Okay."

The rest of the appointment wasn't nearly as interesting. Healer Young spent most of it getting to know her, or trying to. She wasn't feeling especially talkative. But the man appeared to be satisfied with their progress nonetheless, once they were done. She supposed a necessary part of therapy might be getting comfortable with the therapist, so that made sense to her. Still, she was exhausted by the end of it, and when he and Dumbledore left at last, she went back upstairs and went to bed.

 _Next week,_ she thought as she lay there trying to sleep, remembering something Healer Young had said before going. _Another appointment next week. Ugh._

Shrugging internally, she rolled over and let her exhaustion take her into sleep.

Iliana had been too preoccupied the day before to really read her school letter, but now that she did, as she was eating breakfast, she was astonished at its contents. There were eight new books on the list, and seven of them were Gilderoy Lockhart books. Apparently they were on everyone else's lists, too.

"Sure are a lot of Gilderoy Lockhart books here," she commented.

"New DADA teacher must be a witch," Fred said. "Or a pouf guy, not that I'm judging."

"Yeah, that lot won't come cheap," said George, eyeing his parents. "Lockhart's books are expensive."

"Mrs. Weasley, let me buy everyone's Lockhart books, please?" Iliana pleaded. "My parents left me so much money, that lot's nothing to me, and I don't care about money."

"No no, dear, that's all your savings, you need to save up for when you're out of school."

"Mrs. Weasley, you weren't there when I opened my vault last year. I don't know what the exchange rate is between galleons and pounds, but there were at least a million galleons in that vault, and probably just as many sickles, so I very much doubt a few dozen books is going to make much of a dent in that."

"No really, dear," Mrs. Weasley tried to protest, turning red. "We'll manage some-"

"Seven books for five people, that's 35 books. Fred said they're not cheap. Assuming they cost as much as a wand – 7 galleons – that's 245 galleons. If we assume a knut is like a penny, and it's..." she paused, thinking, before continuing, "493 knuts to a galleon, that's about 5 pounds to a galleon, sounds like. So if the books are 7 galleons each, that's 35 pounds per book, or over 1200 pounds for the lot. I think even the Dursleys would balk at that price, and they buy Dudley over 30 expensive gifts every year on his birthday and again on Christmas. I don't pretend to know how much you have in your vaults, Mrs. Weasley, but from what Ron's said and from the evidence of my own eyes, I'm going to have to pull an Al here and insist you shove your pride and let me get the Lockhart books for you. You can get the rest of everyone's school things."

"But-"

"I know you didn't take me in expecting anything in return, but honestly, I think Dumbledore must be mad to let them put this many expensive books on the school booklist. Since I can't go back in time and slap some sense into him before the lists go out, I'm going to insist on paying for these books for you. Two or three hundred galleons is, I assure you, a drop in the bucket compared to what my parents left me. And I know what it's like to be poor; my aunt and uncle never gave me any pocket money, and they barely fed me (well, Harry rather), so I rather like being able to share."

Mrs. Weasley wrung her hands, her face red, but looked like she was considering it, if very reluctantly.

"If it helps, consider it an early – or a late – Christmas present from me."

The Weasley matriarch sighed resignedly. "I suppose, if you insist. Just... don't tell Arthur, please? He'll be even harder to convince than me."

"Done."

Discomfited, Mrs. Weasley left the room, pretending to dust. Iliana turned to see the other Weasley kids staring at her, red-faced – except Percy, who was paying a bit too much attention to his bacon and eggs.

"Mate, I-"

"I'm serious, Ron. I know how much poverty sucks. Worse, I know how it feels to be poor while others are flaunting their wealth in front of you. If I didn't do this, I'd feel as bad as the Dursleys. I'll try not to make a habit of it, for all your family's pride, but if you think I'm going to let someone I care about struggle to pay such a ridiculous amount for something they have no choice about getting, you're mad. Now if you don't mind, I don't want to hear any more protests. I'm doing it, and that's final. Learn to live with it."

Ron nodded, gravely, and went back to his food.

As she shoved some of her own eggs into her mouth with such ferocity that you'd think the eggs had insulted her parents, Fred leaned toward her and whispered, "Thanks, mate. Not all of us are as proud as our parents. Mind you, we'd still have put up a fight if it was us, but we're thankful all the same."

"You're welcome."

She didn't tell them that there was more to it. That would have been enough, of course, but ever since Quirrell... well, she felt like doing this would be a drop in the bucket towards atoning for her sins. But she was so _angry_ with Dumbledore right now for this, that when she finished her meal, she spent an hour writing an angry letter to the headmaster berating him, as politely as she could manage, for letting this travesty happen.

She was just sending Hedwig off to deliver the letter when Ron came in to tell her they were going to be going to Diagon Alley soon.

About half an hour later, they were all standing around the fireplace. For all that she knew _about_ the Floo, Iliana and company had never actually _used_ one, so she regarded it with some apprehension.

"Um... Mrs. Weasley?"

"Yes, dear?"

"I've never used the Floo before."

"Oh well, it's simple enough." She tossed some green powder on the flames, turning the flames green. "You walk into the green flames here, then you clearly state your destination, and it whisks you there. By the way, Arthur, we're almost out of Floo powder, we'll have to buy some more while we're there."

"Sure thing, dear."

"Anyway, Iliana, let me show you," Fred said. He walked into the already ready flames, said "Diagon Alley!" and disappeared. George followed, taking a pinch of Floo powder to re-ready the flames before he, too, vanished.

"You must speak clearly, dear," Mrs. Weasley told her. "And be sure to get out at the right grate. …"

"The right what?" said Iliana nervously as the fire roared and whipped George out of sight, too.

"Well, there are an awful lot of wizard fires to choose from, you know, but as long as you've spoken clearly —"

"She'll be fine, Molly, don't fuss," said Mr. Weasley, helping himself to Floo powder, too.

They gave her further instructions – tuck in your elbows, shut your eyes, don't fidget. It was a lot to remember, and when she got into the green flames (which felt like a warm breeze), she opened her mouth, inhaled hot ash, which made her say "D-Dia-gon Alley."

It felt as though she were being sucked down a giant drain. She seemed to be spinning very fast — the roaring in her ears was deafening — she tried to keep her eyes open but the whirl of green flames made her feel sick — something hard knocked her elbow and she tucked it in tightly, still spinning and spinning — now it felt as though cold hands were slapping her face — squinting at a blurred stream of fireplaces and snatched glimpses of the rooms beyond — her breakfast was churning inside her — she closed her eyes again wishing it would stop, and then —

She fell, face forward, onto cold stone, getting a bloody nose. Dizzy, she took in her surroundings. It was some kind of store with all kinds of nasty looking things in it, like a shriveled hand on a cushion, evil looking masks, human bones, and instruments of torture. What was worse, when they looked out the window, they saw they were clearly not in Diagon Alley.

The sooner they got out, the better. Iliana began to head for the door, but she saw two people coming into the store, so she bolted for cover, hiding in a cabinet. And not a moment too soon, for through a small crack in the cabinet's doorway, she saw Draco Malfoy and a man who – judging by his having the same white blond hair – was Draco's father. They were the last people Iliana wanted to meet when she was lost, covered in soot, and bleeding.

Mr. Malfoy crossed the shop, looking lazily at the items on display, and rang a bell on the counter before turning to his son and saying, "Touch nothing, Draco."

Malfoy, who had reached for the glass eye, said, "I thought you were going to buy me a present."

"I said I would buy you a racing broom," said his father, drumming his fingers on the counter.

"What's the good of that if I'm not on the House team?" said Malfoy, looking sulky and bad-tempered. "the Potter freaks got a Nimbus Two Thousand last year. Special permission from Dumbledore so Iliana could play for Gryffindor. She's not even that good, it's just because they're famous … famous for having a stupid scar on their forehead. …"

Malfoy bent down to examine a shelf full of skulls, then went on raving about Iliana, in a way that sounded almost like he had a crush on her. She felt disgusted by the thought. Malfoy having a crush on her wasn't quite as bad as if Dudley had done, but the idea was similar to her mind.

 _I don't much fancy that thought either,_ Harry said internally.

Iliana and the others watched in apprehension, listening as Mr. Malfoy made plans with the store owner to sell some things, dark items, that he kept in a secret room in his mansion. Well that would make a nice tidbit to tell Mr. Weasley, if they lived to tell the tale.

It seemed to take an age for them to finish, and as it was, Iliana was ready to hex Draco as he got closer and closer to her hiding spot. But finally they left, and the store owner went away as well. Iliana waited a moment, then bolted out of there. But she took one look at the outside and worried. They were so young, and the place looked so sketchy.

Before she knew it, they were glowing and growing, and Alastair stood there, looking 14 years old, which was an improvement. He kept their wand out, his long hair hiding their scar. This worked surprisingly well, as the few people they ran into in the narrow and dark alley jumped back at the sight of him and gave him a wide berth. It was a little confusing, but useful, so he didn't question it.

Then he ran into Hagrid, who shouted, turned to look at him, and said, "Sir-er, Alastair. What're yeh doin in Knockturn Alley, of all the dodgy places?"

"Is that where we are? I got lost in the Floo and ended up in a place called Borgin & Burke's. Can you get me back to the Weasleys?"

"Sure, Al, leh's go, shall we?"

Relaxing now that they were leaving, and Hagrid was with them, Al got his thoughts together enough to notice something.

"Hey," he said. "What were _you_ doing back there, if it's dodgy?"

"Jes getting some flesh eating slug repellent."

"Does that repel flesh eating slugs, or is it a slug repellent that eats flesh?"

"The firs' one, Al."

"I don't know whether to be relieved or terrified by that."

When they got to Gringotts, they saw Hermione on the steps with her parents.

"Damn!" they said, Al shifting back into Harry. "I forgot I wanted to check a price at Flourish and Blotts. Oh well."

"Harry!" Hermione said, running to meet her. "Hi Hagrid! You coming into Gringott's, Harry?"

"Odd," Harry said, feeling his nose. "When we fell into Borgin and Burke's, Iliana got a bloody nose. But neither me nor Al show any sign of that."

"Hey Harry, 'ere come the Weasleys," Hagrid said, gesturing.

Sure enough, a large chunk of the Weasley family came sprinting up after them.

"Harry," Mr. Weasley panted. "We hoped you'd only gone one grate too far. …" He mopped his glistening bald patch. "Molly's frantic — she's coming now —"

"Where did you come out?" Ron asked.

"Knockturn Alley," said Hagrid grimly.

"Excellent!" said Fred and George together.

"We've never been allowed in," said Ron enviously.

"I should ruddy well think not," growled Hagrid.

Mrs. Weasley now came galloping into view, her handbag swinging wildly in one hand, Ginny just clinging onto the other.

"Oh, Harry — oh, my dear — you could have been anywhere — But you didn't even get dirty, it seems."

"Iliana did. She was covered in soot, and had a bloody nose. It must've gone away when we shifted to Al, then to me."

On their way into the bank, Harry regaled them with the tale of what happened in Borgin and Burke's. Right enough, Mr. Weasley was very interested in the secret room in the Malfoy manor, under the drawing room. Hagrid said his goodbyes, though, apparently going off somewhere else.

Mr. Weasley got rather distracted by the Grangers, them being Muggles and all, but they finally got in. When Harry got to one of the goblins, he asked the goblin very politely if they did checks or money orders. They did indeed have something like a check, so he ordered one for the amount of 350 galleons, bought a book of extras in case he needed them for something later, got an exact count of his money from the goblins (over 3 million galleons in his trust vault, another 10 million in a vault he'd get access to at 17, and both earning money from various stocks and bonds, much to his amazement) then went down to his vault to fill his money bags with gold for the year, and got some of it exchanged for British pounds.

Mr. and Mrs. Granger and Hermione took Harry into Muggle London to shop for clothing, and they all agreed to meet at Flourish and Blotts in a couple hours, which should be enough time to go clothes shopping, then return to Diagon Alley for all his other school supplies.

Harry followed Hermione around the store, going into the girl's section with her. Hermione might've been embarrassed, if not for the fact that Iliana shared a body with Harry. Harry, for his part, seemed to forget where he was, and picked up a few things for himself without realizing.

"Hermione," Harry asked as he noticed the Grangers coming back toward them. "How much have you told your parents about me?"

"Oh. Well, it was difficult, but I figured I should tell the truth, as weird as it is. Oddly, they accepted it almost as easily as they accepted magic being real. More easily, even."

He laughed. "Well I guess that once you accept magic as real, it opens your mind."

"Harry," she said, noticing the things he was wanting to try on. "I don't think those would look very good on Iliana. Her coloring is much different from you."

"What? No, these are for me."

"We're in the girl's section, Harry."

"Are we?" he shrugged. "Well, I don't care. I'm a girl more than I'm a boy."

Hermione looked at him thoughtfully. He stared back at her.

"Okay then. But you'll have to go to the boy's dressing rooms."

He nodded, and went to find them.

Later, when he had a bunch of things picked out for him, mostly rather unisex looking blouses and comfortable girl's slacks, as well as a couple packages of underpants from the boy's section, even though he'd been eyeing some of the girl's panties, he knew Iliana would need to shop as well, so he called Zoey, knowing she had the power to force switches. He decided they should change in the boy's changing room, so that's where he was when he talked to her.

 _Zoey, we need to be Iliana now._

 _Righty-oh, Harry,_ she said. Then, _Oh wow! I can talk with you all now! That's new._

With a glow, they shrunk but then shot up again, Iliana appearing. She came out, startling Hermione's parents.

"Ah, you must be, er... Iliana," Mrs. Granger said. "Nice to meet you."

"Likewise," Iliana said, smiling.

And so they started over again, Iliana wandering the store with Hermione, getting things specifically for her. Luckily, they didn't appear to need anything for the others; Zoey and Al both manifested their own clothes. Sure, so did Harry and Iliana to a point, but they were Iliana or Harry so often that some of Harry's clothes ended up permanently transformed, since the clothes only transformed if they were being worn during a transformation.

Neither of the Grangers seemed terribly comfortable with them, though, after transforming. They were clearly trying, but still, Iliana was glad when they were done buying their things and rejoining the Weasleys at Flourish and Blotts.

When they got there, the place was packed. Apparently, Gilderoy Lockhart was handing out signed copies of his autobiography. Why he needed an autobiography, when his other books appeared to be tales from his adventures, Iliana didn't know. But it made getting their books very difficult. Iliana went to the bloke at the desk and ordered all the copies of the Lockhart books for herself and the Weasleys, told him to hold them there at the front while she got the rest of her books. Before she took off, though, she made sure he would take a check for it, which he said he gladly would.

Even with all the other people, it wasn't too hard to find her other book, The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2. She spent the rest of the time looking around at the other books. Al and Harry put in suggestions for books, too. She got a few Defense Against the Dark Arts books that weren't on the list, a book of hexes for Al, a wizarding novel just to see what their writing was like, and even though Care of Magical Creatures wasn't til next year, she got a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them by Newt Scamander, as well as a small book on the care and feeding of grass snakes. She felt Aqua shift against her arm, under her robes.

She met up with Hermione again, who had so many books with her that she had grabbed what looked like a wooden wheelbarrow to carry them all. Most of them were Lockhart books, but of course Hermione had also bought a bunch of books that weren't on the curriculum, too.

"Where do you find those barrows? I could really use one."

"Sure. Oooh, what did you get?" Hermione looked eagerly, tearing herself away just long enough to grab a barrow for Iliana. "Iliana, do you really think you should be getting a book of hexes?"

"Seeing as we've got an evil dark wizard after our blood, we need all the fighting edge we can get. And anyway, this isn't even the one Al really wanted, but the section he wanted to check is off limits to anyone under 17."

"Oh, did I tell you about my new pet?"

"Pet?"

"A grass snake that Zoey found at Hogwarts. Which is useful, because then if snakes aren't allowed, we can just let her go on the grounds. But I've seen animals other than cats, owls, and toads there, so it shouldn't be a problem." She smiled and looked around, deciding it was safe. _'Aqua,'_ she whispered in Parseltongue, _'come on out.'_

Hermione's eyes went wide at the barely audible hissing and spitting sound, then again at the sight of the grass snake.

"You weren't speaking English there. I don't know what you were doing."

"Dumbledore says it's called Parseltongue. Shoot, I forgot it's a secret. But I trust you, Hermione."

"Why is it a secret?"

"It's a rare gift, one associated with dark wizards. You-Know-Who can do it too."

At this, Iliana's brow furrowed in thought. _Well that's an odd coincidence._

 _ **I doubt it's a coincidence. This is Significant, I know it. I don't know how, but it is,**_ Al said.

"Don't worry, I'll keep it a secret. What's her name?"

"Her name is Aqua. And just to be plain, Aqua isn't a secret, just the fact I can speak with her. Honestly, I'm glad Dumbledore told me. I was confused when we couldn't do the same with other animals, I thought speaking with animals was just a thing wizards could do, like maybe Dr. Doolittle had been a real person, a wizard or witch. But apparently not."

A few minutes later, they found Mrs. Weasley again, in line to meet Lockhart. She seemed a little too excited to meet him, for a woman who was happily married, but Iliana said nothing.

Lockhart came into view, then, looking like a male model with supernaturally shiny teeth and robes of forget-me-not blue that exactly matched his eyes. Iliana felt herself get very hot in the face and wriggly in the tummy as she looked at him. Apparently it wasn't all blond-haired, blue eyed men she had a problem with, just ones that were horrible people. She glanced over to Hermione, who looked to be feeling the same. She felt Al and Harry roll their eyes from within, and ignored them.

To her horror, Lockhart noticed her scar. He leapt to his feet and practically shouted, "It _can't_ be the famous Potter, er... girl, can it? Sorry dear, what's your name? I only know Harry Potter's name."

"Um... Iliana Potter."

"Iliana Potter, yes."

The crowd was excitedly jostling around them as he pulled her forward into view. Harry screamed inside her head to get away, but she couldn't move, she was like a deer in headlights.

"Great big smile, Iliana," his own teeth gleaming enough for the both of them. "Together, you and I are worth the front page."

When he let her go at last, she tried to get away back to the Weasleys, but the man put his arm around her in a very familiar gesture, trapping her there.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said loudly, waving for quiet. "What an extraordinary moment this is! The perfect moment for me to make a little announcement I've been sitting on for some time!

"When young Iliana here stepped into Flourish and Blotts today, she only wanted to buy my autobiography — which I shall be happy to present her now, free of charge —" The crowd applauded again. "She had no idea," Lockhart continued, giving her a little shake that made glare at him, "that she would shortly be getting much, much more than my book, Magical Me. She and her schoolmates will, in fact, be getting the real magical me. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have great pleasure and pride in announcing that this September, I will be taking up the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry!"

 _ **Lovely. This guy is such a ponce.**_ Al grumbled to her. She grimaced, and tried harder to get away.

The crowd cheered, and she found herself being presented with Lockhart's entire collected works, which she put in her wheelbarrow with a mental note to give this set to Ginny and take the extra set off her order. In fact, when she finally got away, she dumped them in Ginny's cauldron.

"Here you go, I don't want this set."

"Bet you loved that, didn't you, Potter?" said a voice Iliana had no trouble recognizing. She straightened up and found herself face-to-face with Draco Malfoy, who was wearing his usual sneer.

"Famous Harry Potter and company," said Malfoy. "Can't even go into a bookshop without making the front page."

Iliana's face contorted with rage and embarrassment. Al was pissed too, but Iliana was angrier, so she continued controlling the body. "Buzz off, Malfoy, you great albino git," she snarled.

"Such language for a girl, I wonder if that's one of the boys talking. Hey Harry, Al, what's it like having nothing between your legs?"

"Keep talking, Malfoy, and you'll soon find out for yourself."

She was glad to see him turn paler than usual.

"Why see here, you little-" he stopped, as someone approached.

Ron and Hermione fought their way over, both clutching stacks of Lockhart's books.

"Oh, it's you," said Ron, looking at Malfoy as if he were something unpleasant on the sole of his shoe. "Bet you're surprised to see Iliana here, eh?"

"Not as surprised as I am to see you in a shop, Weasley," retorted Malfoy. "I suppose your parents will go hungry for a month to pay for all those."

"You may have loads of money, Malfoy, but the Weasleys are richer than you'll ever be, because they love one another. I'm sorry your daddy never tells you he loves you, that he tries to buy your love with material possessions, but just because you're jealous doesn't mean you have the right to bully people."

Now Malfoy was turning red, his own face contorting in rage.

"Don't you _dare_ talk that way about my family, Potter. Just because I find it amusing to point out how you're rooting around in this Weasley garbage doesn't mean-"

He stopped in panic as Ron, who had gone beet red, dropped his books into Ginny's cauldron, too, and started toward Malfoy, but Iliana and Hermione grabbed the back of his jacket before he could pound Malfoy into hamburger.

"Ron!" said Mr. Weasley, struggling over with Fred and George. "What are you doing? It's too crowded in here, let's go outside."

"He called us garbage, Dad!"

He glared at Malfoy. He looked like he wanted to say something scathing, but was too polite to do so. And then the elder Mr. Malfoy appeared, giving Mr. Weasley another reason to look scathing.

"Well, well, well — Arthur Weasley."

"Lucius Malfoy," Mr. Weasley said coldly.

"Busy time at the Ministry, I hear," said Mr. Malfoy. "All those raids … I hope they're paying you overtime?"

He reached into Ginny's cauldron and extracted, from amid the glossy Lockhart books, a very old, very battered copy of A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration.

"Obviously not," Mr. Malfoy said. "Dear me, what's the use of being a disgrace to the name of wizard if they don't even pay you well for it?"

Mr. Weasley flushed darker than Ron.

"We have a very different idea of what disgraces the name of wizard, Malfoy," he said.

"Clearly," said Mr. Malfoy, his pale eyes straying to Mr. and Mrs. Granger, who were watching apprehensively. "The company you keep, Weasley … and I thought your family could sink no lower —"

There was a thud of metal as Ginny's cauldron went flying; Mr. Weasley had thrown himself at Mr. Malfoy, knocking him backward into a bookshelf. Dozens of heavy spellbooks came thundering down on all their heads; there was a yell of, "Get him, Dad!" from Fred or George; Mrs. Weasley was shrieking, "No, Arthur, no!"; the crowd stampeded backward, knocking more shelves over; "Gentlemen, please — please!" cried the assistant.

But it wasn't the assistant that managed to break up the fight. Iliana was so _furious_ at Mr. Malfoy, that her magic exploded out of her and sent both men flying backwards away from each other. Then, louder than anyone else in the room-

"Break it up, there, gents, break it up —"

Hagrid was wading toward them through the sea of books. In an instant he had pulled Mr. Weasley up to his feet, almost tearing his arm out of its socket by accident as he did. "No more fightin, now, please," Hagrid said, attempting to help Mr. Malfoy up as well and getting a death glare for his trouble. Mr. Weasley had a cut lip and Mr. Malfoy had been hit in the eye by an Encyclopedia of Toadstools. He was still holding Ginny's old Transfiguration book. He thrust it at her, his eyes glittering with malice.

"Here, girl — take your book — it's the best your father can give you —" Pulling himself together, he beckoned to Draco and swept from the shop.

"Yeh should've ignored him, Arthur," said Hagrid, almost lifting Mr. Weasley off his feet as he straightened his robes. "Rotten ter the core, the whole family, everyone knows that — no Malfoy's worth listenin' ter — bad blood, that's what it is — come on now — let's get outta here."

The assistant looked as though he wanted to stop them from leaving, but he barely came up to Hagrid's waist and seemed to think better of it. They hurried up the street, the Grangers shaking with fright and Mrs. Weasley beside herself with fury.

"A fine example to set for your children … brawling in public … what Gilderoy Lockhart must've thought —"

"He was pleased," said Fred. "Didn't you hear him as we were leaving? He was asking that bloke from the Daily Prophet if he'd be able to work the fight into his report — said it was all publicity —"

Still, they were all subdued as Iliana filled out the Gringott's check for the Weasley's books – one of which was now hers, since Ginny had the ones he'd given Iliana for free. This may have been for the best, as Mr. Weasley didn't seem to be paying enough attention to realize what she was doing, and thus didn't try to object. She also paid for the rest of her books, with gold from her bags.

They were still subdued when they got to the Leaky Cauldron, though Iliana – getting a prompt from Harry – spoke with the Grangers and the Weasleys about getting Harry new glasses to replace the ugly ones that had been broken many times, that their aunt had paid a pittance for at some place with bargain basement prices. This took their minds off the fight for a little while as they talked it out, finally deciding to go back into Diagon Alley and find the wizarding optometrist's shop.

Hermione and her parents were fascinated by the place, when they got there. So was Iliana, though she didn't stay long, having Zoey help them pull Harry out all the way, since it was he who needed glasses. The glow of their transformation lit the poorly lit shop enough to get the attention of a portly old man who looked like Benjamin Franklin with a ponytail and bangs.

"Hello there, he—oh my! Good gods, my dear child, where ever did you get those horrendous glasses?"

"At some very cheap Muggle shop," Harry answered. "My aunt purposefully picked out the ugliest pair she could, that didn't cost too much. I won't need my prescription from there, will I?"

"Oh heavens no, I-" the clerk noticed Harry's scar. "Ah, you're the famous Potter boy, are you? Very good, very good. This way, the Vis-o-matic is over here."

The Vis-o-matic turned out to be a wizarding device that he looked into, got his eyes flashed with purple light, and it spit out a prescription. The clerk grinned at this.

"Take a look around, Mr. Potter, pick out something you like."

With the help of the Weasleys and Grangers, he spent nearly an hour looking at the different wizarding glasses. Almost all of them were guaranteed unbreakable by most usual means. Others had charms cast on them that would keep them stuck to your face until you or someone else took them off deliberately, and there was even a pair that had a button letting you see behind you. Harry and Al both thought this was so useful they decided to get it, even though it was the most expensive variety. Harry picked out a slender set of frames with oval lenses, the frames a violet color that looked surprisingly good on his face, made his eyes pop, and made his face look better than the ugly old set had.

The clerk took the set he chose and took them in the back to transfigure the lenses. When he came back, he had Harry try them on.

"Wow, I can see even better with these than with my current set."

"Yes, the Vis-o-matic is superior to Muggle optometry. Cost a hefty sum, but I wouldn't want to be without it. Well, Mr. Potter, I'll give you a discount if you tell people you got your glasses here at Wally Gorey's Wizarding Eyeglasses and Monacles, okay?"

"Um, okay. How much?"

"That'll be fifteen galleons, Mr. Potter."

" _Fifteen_ galleons?" Ron said incredulously.

"Down from our usual 20 for that pair."

"TWENTY?"

"Well Ron," Harry said, "To be fair, there is this button here on the side that lets me see out the back of my head. That alone makes it worth it. Then he said they're unbreakable and stuff, too."

"Yes indeed. Certified unbreakable or twice your money back. Nothing short of a basilisk fang would break them, and there aren't many of _those_ banging about. And of course the Stay-On charm, so they won't fall off by accident and get lost."

Harry handed over the gold gladly, ignoring Ron's stares of incredulity.

As they walked back to the Leaky Cauldron to say their goodbyes to the Grangers, Ron kept looking sullen.

"Sorry. I'm not like, meaning to flaunt my wealth or anything, it's just I get so tired of looking like the scruffy nerf-herder my aunt and uncle think I am, that it feels good to get some nice stuff for myself. In fact, HA! I can just imagine what they'd look like if they saw me now."

"What? Oh, no worries, mate. I'm just a little jealous."

"There's no need for that. If you want anything, I love sharing. I love having stuff to share with friends."

Ron turned red. "I won't be a moocher."

"Ron, I don't mind, really. You heard what that goblin said. Three million galleons, more when I turn 17. I-"

"No. Birthdays and, and Christmas gifts are fine. But only those."

Harry shrugged. "Okay, if you insist. But if some emergency comes up, I may well insist helping out."

"Like with the Lockhart books?"

"Or something more dire. I can't think of an example, though. But like, if your wand broke, I'd replace it for you."

"Yeah, I can see that counting as an emergency. It's a deal; birthdays, Christmas, and emergencies."

"Good."

Even with them being unbreakable and charmed to stay on his face, Harry was tempted to stow his new glasses in his trousers before Flooing back to the Burrow, but he didn't. He didn't like the Floo, and hoped there were other, less horrible means of magical travel. But for now, he just walked into the green flames.

Even with Iliana's appointments every week, the summer still went by faster than they would have liked. Harry spent most of the time Out, mostly only switching to Iliana for her appointments. But she tended to hang around after, come early, or both, and spent a lot of that time talking with Ginny, and hanging out in Ginny's room. Ginny would blush like mad and go silent when Harry was around, but around Iliana she was comfortable. They still hadn't informed Ginny of the fact that Harry could hear everything they talked about, but so far they hadn't discussed anything that would embarrass Ginny, and Iliana intended to keep it that way, steering the conversation away from certain topics if she had to, which wasn't often. If Ginny ever insisted on pursuing those topics, Iliana vowed to stop her and explain before the other girl could blunder on.

But for all her crush on Harry, Ginny didn't seem to want to discuss it. Thinking about Harry seemed to be like gum in the gears, freezing her mind in place, and Iliana couldn't decide if that was a relief or not. Especially since something about the nature of their conversations had changed after the trip to Diagon Alley. Ginny had seemed comfortable and open around Iliana, but after the Diagon Alley trip, she got harder to talk with, and was in her room a lot more. Iliana was a little sad, but knew it was the nature of young people like themselves to get moody. Puberty came for people at different ages depending on lots of different factors, including caloric intake, and considering how well the Weasleys always ate (despite their poverty), it was likely Ginny would be hitting puberty earlier than the Potter collective, with their history of malnutrition.

The day they went back to Hogwarts was chaos, everyone running around pell-mell, and several times they had to go back for things, including Ginny's diary. They were running so late that when they finally got to King's Cross, they had to dash like mad to platform 9 and 3/4ths.

Ron and Harry – as Iliana hadn't had an appointment for days – were the last two to go through the barrier. They both went ahead together, running at the barrier in their hurry-

BANG! They smashed into a solid wall and everything went flying.

Ignoring the dark mutters and strange looks from the Muggles around them, they struggled to get their stuff together, giving the flimsy excuse that they'd lost control of their trolleys.

"Why can't we get through to the platform?" asked Ron.

"I don't know," admitted Harry.

 _ **How much you wanna bet this has something to do with Dobby? He was pretty insistent we should stay away from Hogwarts.**_

"Oh right," Harry said aloud. "I'll bet Dobby is doing this."

"We're going to miss the train!"

Harry looked at the clock. Sure enough, the seconds til the train left ran out before his eyes.

"It's gone," said Ron, sounding stunned. "The train's left. What if Mum and Dad can't get back through to us? Have you got any Muggle money?"

Harry checked his bags. "Yeah, there's still some left from my clothes shopping. Enough to get us some food if we needed, anyway. But that won't help us get to school, and I don't know how to get to the Leaky Cauldron from here."

"Why would we need to go there?"

"Well we could use the Floo to go to somewhere in Hogsmeade."

Ron visibly relaxed at this. "Yeah. Yeah, we have options."

"For now, though, we should probably wait by the car in case your parents _can_ get through."

"Harry!" said Ron, his eyes gleaming. "The car!"

"What about it?"

"We can fly the car to Hogwarts!"

If Al rolled Harry's eyes any harder at this, they would have pulled a muscle.

"Oh yeah, fly an illegal flying car to school," Harry heard Al say with his voice, "when we don't even know where school _is_ from here, thus breaking the statute of secrecy; what a _brilliant_ plan! Or we could just, you know, wait for your parents to get back. Or, if all else fails, send Hedwig to let the headmaster know where we are."

"They don't need the car," Ron said. "They can Apparate. And the car has an invisibility booster."

"Oh yeah, it won't bother them at ALL that the car is suddenly missing. They won't assume some Muggle stole it and now has access to the magic of a world they're not supposed to know about. Honestly, Ron..."

"Okay, okay, so it's a stupid idea. Sorry for suggesting it."

They went back to the car to wait for the Weasleys. In the meantime, Harry wrote out a letter to Dumbledore explaining what was going on, just in case they didn't get back.

Sure enough, the Weasleys turned up.

"Ronald Billius Weasley," Mrs. Weasley snapped as they approached. "Why aren't you and Harry on the train?"

"Don't blame him, Mrs. Weasley. The barrier sealed against us. We suspect Dobby's the cause."

"Well," Mr. Weasley said, "house elf magic _is_ quite different from our own. If Dobby was sent by his masters to stop you, there's not much that could prevent him from managing it. A house elf's highest law is obeying orders."

"What about the Floo?"

Mrs. Weasley looked unsure. "Well normally, yes, we could Floo to Hogsmeade, but with this Dobby business, and your previous experience getting lost..."

"So one of you could go ahead, then the other come on after me."

"No dear, that won't be needed. We'll just use the Knight Bus."

"The... what now?"

"Arthur, dear, you drive the car home, since I don't know how to do it. I'll take Ron and Harry to school."

"Sure thing, Molly dear."

Mrs. Weasley took Ron, Harry, and their things to the nearest road and demonstrated by holding her wand arm out over the road, with her wand in her hand. With a BANG a violently purple triple-decker bus appeared, nearly hitting a fire hydrant that leaped out of the way of the bus.

A pimply-faced young wizard stepped out and announced, "Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, step on board-"

"Yes, yes, I know that already."

"Hey, ent you 'arry-"

"HUSH you, just help us get our stuff onboard."

The pimply wizard rolled his eyes. "Alright, alright, keep yer 'ead on, lady."

Once their things were aboard, Harry paid for the ride before Mrs. Weasley could protest.

"Now Ron, Harry, you'll have to hang on. It's a very bumpy ride."

The doors shut. Harry sat down in an armchair that was loose.

"Where to?"

"Hogsmeade."

"'ogsmeade? Wot, like 'ogwarts? Why dinnit you use the train?"

"Missed the train through no fault of our own. Now would you go already?"

"Sure thing. Ern?"

"This thing would fail every single Muggle safety regulation on the books," Harry said, not entirely sure which one of them was actually speaking.

When the thing took off, he found out how right he was. The furniture slid around like mad whenever they started or stopped, as the bus shot forward unnaturally fast and stopped with equal quickness. It was a wonder the chairs stayed on the floor at all, in fact. Probably more magic. Though why they couldn't have used magic to just bolt the chairs into place, he didn't know.

Every time they took off, they would suddenly be somewhere completely different; the bus appeared to be able to do something similar to Apparating, though instead of going straight to its destination, it went somewhere close and sped through the intervening space barely paying attention to where the road was. It was all such a jostling ride that it was no wonder everyone on board looked ill. He wasn't surprised that so many people lost their breakfast on the ground when they stepped off at their destination.

It must have taken over an hour for them to finally get to Hogsmeade. But finally the pimply wizard – whose name he found was Stan Shunpike – announced they were there, and helped Ron and Harry get their things out. They got out finding themselves facing Hagrid checking the hitches on the thestrals pulling the school carriages.

"Harry? Ron? What're you lot doin here already? Oh, hey Molly."

"We missed the train, Hagrid! The barrier closed against us. Harry reckons... well, it'd be too difficult to explain now."

"Don't worry, I told him about Dobby in a letter."

"Barrier sealed against yeh? An yeh reckon Dobby did it?"

"Yes. He was very keen on us not going. He had a full blown hysterical fit when he found out we weren't staying at the Dursleys at all anymore."

"Well let me get yer things to the castle. Elves?" he said with authority, but politely. A pair of house elves, looking very different from Dobby – better fed and clean, for instance – appeared.

"Sir is requesting help?"

"Yeah. Can yeh take these things up ter the Griffindor boy's dorm for them? They ran into a bit o trouble and had ter come up a different way."

The two elves saluted him. "Yes sir, we is getting your things, sirs!"

"Hold on a moment, we need our school robes," Harry pointed out.

"Oh, right!"

They pulled their school robes on over their Muggle attire, then closed their trunks.

"There you go, guys."

"Thank you, sirs!"

With a CRACK, the elves and all their school things vanished.

"So how are the thestrals, Hagrid?"

"Thestrals?" Ron asked.

"The school carriages are pulled by winged horse-like things that people can only see if they've seen death," Harry explained. "And I – we – can see them."

Ron stretched out a hand and felt leathery hide. "Wicked!" he said.

"Now boys, enough of that. You should get on up into the castle where it's safe."

Molly seemed relieved that Hagrid was there to guide them up to the castle. They said their goodbyes to Mrs. Weasley, who Disapparated as the carriages trundled up to the castle.

It was weird being in the Great Hall with nobody else there but Sir Nicolas. None of the teachers were even there, so they had an idle conversation with the Griffindor ghost, mostly consisting of them explaining why they were early.

When the teachers finally came in, Snape looked like he wanted to swoop down on them like an angry bat, but McGonagall glared at him before striding over.

"Hagrid told me what happened with the barrier, but I don't understand."

"Well I wrote a letter to Dumbledore in case the Weasleys couldn't get back. It might explain things, Professor." Harry said, handing her the letter.

She read it with a stern scowl, then nodded. "I shall inform the headmaster. Thank you for this excellent explanation, Potter."

"You're welcome, Professor."

So they waited, Ron's stomach growling louder and louder the longer it took. But finally, a mass of students began streaming in, giving the two of them odd looks. But they didn't speak until the twins, Hermione, Neville, Dean, and Seamus arrived. Harry retold the story, and – as he was getting tired of telling it already – asked them to explain for him if anyone else asked.

Harry was pleased to witness a Sorting that wasn't his own. It was a lot of fun cheering for Ginny and the other new Griffindors. Al and Iliana both bristled in anger when the first two new Slytherins to be Sorted were booed, and after that Harry began cheering for everyone, including new Slytherins, which got him a lot of weird looks from his fellow Griffindors, and even some of the people from Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff.

As the feast began, Fred and George nodded at Harry to get his attention.

"Why'd you cheer the Slytherins, mate?"

"Because they're only kids. Eleven year old kids who have done nothing wrong, and are being booed only because they got sorted into an unpopular House. Anyone who boos them should feel ashamed of themselves for bullying little kids."

The twins both did, at least, have the decency to look ashamed, as did everyone else in earshot. The subject got quickly changed, though.

"You have new glasses, Harry," Dean noted.

"Yeah. I hated the ugly ones my aunt and uncle got me. I also got new Muggle clothes; burned all the old stuff handed down to me from Dudley. Oh, I'm supposed to say I got them from Wally Gorey's Wizarding Eyeglasses and Monacles."

"Good for you, mate. I never understood why you wore that stuff."

"It was all I had. And it took me a whole year to realize I have enough money now to replace it all."

"How's Iliana been?" asked George.

"She seems to be getting better. Still doesn't come out a lot anymore, though now it's mainly because I decided I wanted to be Out more than I was. I feel like I'd been hiding all last year. And given that I suddenly went from the hated scum of the earth to world famous overnight, I guess I just wanted to get away from the stress of it. But am I a Griffindor, or not? So I've decided to stop hiding."

"Good on you, mate. Iliana's fun and all, but I've been wondering about you for a long time. Glad to hear it."

Throughout the rest of the feast, whenever he wasn't eating, Harry would demonstrate the new glasses, including the see-behind-you feature, to great effect.

So it was that Harry was happy enough, when he fell asleep that night, to not have any nightmares for once.

 **End note one:** I came up with Healer Young's name interestingly. The surname I got from Carl Jung's surname (Jung being normally pronounced "Young), and "Yonas" I came up on my own by doing the same J-as-Y thing as Jung's name, on the name Jonas. Only when I had the thought to Google "Yonas" did I discover it was already a name, meaning "Dove." I think it fits him perfectly. (Apparently the Jonas spelling means the same thing, as well.)

 **End note two:** There is, of course, now a term for the Potter's version of Multiplicity: mid-continuum multiplicity. But I don't know how far back in time the online Multiplicity community goes, or when the term was coined, so I'm assuming that in the early 1990's it either hadn't been coined, or it wasn't well known enough for Healer Young to know of it. **Also, back in the early 90's, they were still using the term Multiple Personality Disorder**. It wasn't changed to DID until after 2005, I think, which is when our own collective started to join the online Multiplicity community. We personally prefer a term from the book Blindsight by Peter Watts, though: "Multiple Consciousness Complex."

 **End note three:** Yes, I know Iliana's estimate of pounds to galleons is incorrect, but I'm assuming she doesn't know the actual exchange rate, and is guessing.

 **End note four:** In a review on , a guest asked me where the Stone goes when Zoey is out but didn't bring the Stone with her. Admittedly, I did not answer that then. The answer is based on something in the Djao'Mor'Terra collective (my collective) called the Cellar. Our shared mindspace has two areas: the Living Room and the Cellar. The Living Room is where all conscious activity happens, where we all live and watch through the senses and argue and stuff. The Cellar is where one or more of us goes to hide, sometimes. We have no idea what goes on inside the Cellar, because we can't see into it when we're in the Living Room and we don't remember anything we did in the Cellar when we come out from there. But things can be down there indefinitely, and it's possible that there are secret Others down there, because every now and then stuff floats up from there, like entire completed poems.

Zoey's personal internal space is loosely based on the Cellar, in that she can stick stuff in there or pull it out as she pleases. The Stone is in their version of the Cellar whenever she's in _or_ out and only leaves that area when she wills it. The camera she manifested in an earlier chapter is in there, too.

 **End note five/last:** A reviewer at mentioned that this story "blots over all the bad parts that could have caused [the multiplicity]." I would like to point out here, as I did to them, that this is because I do _not_ believe multiplicity is caused by trauma. If it were, there'd be so many multiples that nobody would doubt they exist, as there would be probably several hundred million individual human bodies (or more) with the condition if trauma/abuse caused it.

I believe people who are multiples are just born with an inclination towards multiplicity, and trauma might drive wedges between the different people, the multiplicity being latched onto as an escape/coping mechanism that makes the different people lose awareness of each other, but that they might have become a Multiple even without the trauma.

I say these things because of my own experience of being a multiple. This story is a thinly veiled tale of my own experiences. The most trauma I've had in my early life was being bullied, and I've never heard of bullying being sufficient trauma to cause DID/MPD. There's a whole litany of data recovered from my memories over the years, too, that has led me to the conclusion that I just was always inclined to become a multiple, and for mysterious reasons it just happened. I admit the bullying may have exacerbated things a little, but all of us can communicate with one another and always could. Just like Harry in this fic, I just thought I was ridiculously moody or something until something that is a very long story happened to introduce me into taking the multiplicity idea as a serious consideration for ourselves. I hadn't, before, despite having read Sybil, because the popular depictions of MPD/DID are - when not laughably inaccurate - very far removed from our own experience of multiplicity.

We also do not consider being a Multiple to be _inherently_ a mental illness. True, there are many whose experience of DID/MPD is one of mental illness. Our collective, however, functions - if anything - better than I (Tempest) did when I thought I was a singleton, the others beginning to join me in here starting in my teen years to help me function in a world I was not doing well in before, and in order for something to be a mental illness, it has to 1. Impair functioning and/or 2. Be distressing to the person who has it. Neither of these is true for us, and therefore we prefer a term for it that we found in Blindsight by Peter Watts: "Multiple Consciousness Complex."

So this fanfic is our attempt at portraying a healthy Multiple collective that, while they have had a tough life, are **not** a trauma-created collective.


	7. Lurking Dangers

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 7"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Seven: Lurking Dangers

Note: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

The next day, Harry made sure to ask Professor McGonagall about whether or not Aqua was allowed. She seemed a little surprised, but as it was just a harmless grass snake, the only thing she said about it was "Do try to prevent it eating Longbottom's toad, will you?"

After breakfast, they had Herbology with Professor Sprout, who looked distinctly pestered as she tried to get rid of Lockhart. His immaculate turquoise robes and hat could not have been more of a contrast to her patched, frayed, and dirty clothing if he'd tried. Harry felt a stirring of fancy from Iliana, and got a flash image of Al miming retching.

"Oh hello there," Lockhart beamed at the students. "Just been showing Professor Sprout the right way to water Mandrakes. Oh, she's quite capable, I assure you, but they can be finicky blighters, and I've run into several wild ones on my many adventures, so I was just offering her the benefit of my unique experience."

"Greenhouse three today, chaps!" said Professor Sprout, who was looking distinctly disgruntled, not at all her usual cheerful self.

There was a murmur of interest. They had only ever worked in greenhouse one before — greenhouse three housed far more interesting and dangerous plants. Professor Sprout took a large key from her belt and unlocked the door. Harry caught a whiff of damp earth and fertilizer mingling with the heavy perfume of some giant, umbrella-sized flowers dangling from the ceiling. He was about to follow Ron and Hermione inside when Lockhart's hand shot out.

"Harry! I've been wanting a word — you don't mind if he's a couple of minutes late, do you, Professor Sprout?"

Judging by Professor Sprout's scowl, she did mind, but Lockhart said, "That's the ticket," and closed the greenhouse door in her face.

Harry glared at the man, wondering what could be so important as to pull him out of class.

"Harry," said Lockhart, his large white teeth gleaming in the sunlight as he shook his head. "Harry, Harry, Harry."

Completely confused, Harry said nothing.

"When I heard — well, of course, it was all my fault. Could have kicked myself."

Harry had no idea what he was talking about. He was about to say so when Lockhart went on, "Taking the Knight Bus to school instead of the train, honestly. Now I know that after that taste of fame I gave you in Flourish and Blotts, taking the train with the rest of those peasants must've felt degrading, but Harry, you're going about it all wrong."

Harry was feeling such a bizarre mix of emotions from himself, Al, and Iliana that he didn't know where to even begin classifying it, so he just continued to stare, perplexed, at the man as he spoke.

Lockhart sighed, but grinned. In point of fact, he had not stopped grinning the whole time he'd been there, and Harry wondered if his face had frozen that way permanently.

"Now I know you've already got this whole thing with You-Know-Who, and surviving his killing curse and all. I know, I know — it's not quite as good as winning Witch Weekly's Most-Charming-Smile Award five times in a row, as I have — but it's a start, Harry, it's a start."

Harry glared deeper at him, feeling his face turn red. Alastair took the opportunity to look into Lockhart's eyes. Whatever he saw there made him hiss like an angry cat Inside and pull back.

"But really, Harry, you're getting ahead of yourself. Besides that and our shared photo in the Daily Prophet, what have you really done? Yet here you are, buying fancy new glasses for yourself, riding the Knight Bus to school, showing up in the Great Hall before everyone else. It comes off just a bit egotistical at this stage. But I can help you work up your image, Harry, because you remind me of me when I was young."

"I couldn't get through the barrier at platform 9 and 3/4th, sir. That's why I had to take the Knight Bus. And really, I would have preferred being on the train with my friends. I don't even _like_ being famous."

"Ah yes, that's the cover story you need right there, Harry. You're really quite clever at this, aren't you?"

"It's not a cover story, you twit! And I got the glasses because the others were hideous and I want to get rid of every reminder of the Dursleys that I can. Now if you don't mind – and even if you do mind – I'm going back to class."

Harry stormed off back into class, leaving that addle-pated nincompoop alone, and apologized irritably to Professor Sprout.

"Sorry about that, Professor. That idiot wanted to bleat at me like a brain damaged goat about some nonsense."

Professor Sprout snickered at this, and gestured him to get into position.

"We shall be repotting mandrakes today," Sprout said. "Now, who can tell me the properties of the Mandrake?"

To nobody's surprise, Hermione's hand was first into the air.

"Mandrake, or Mandragora, is a powerful restorative," said Hermione, sounding as usual as though she had swallowed the textbook. "It is used to return people who have been transfigured or cursed to their original state."

"Excellent. Ten points to Gryffindor," said Professor Sprout. "The Mandrake forms an essential part of most antidotes. It is also, however, dangerous. Who can tell me why?"

Hermione's hand narrowly missed Harry's glasses as it shot up again.

"The cry of the Mandrake is fatal to anyone who hears it," she said promptly.

"Precisely. Take another ten points," said Professor Sprout.

Harry listened carefully to the instructions. So did Iliana and Al, which he'd always found helpful. If he missed something, then one of the others would catch it. So when they all got their earmuffs on, he felt very ready. He watched as Professor Sprout repotted a mandrake. It looked like an ugly, muddy baby made of wood.

After the demonstration, she told them that the seedlings wouldn't kill you yet, but knock you out for several hours. Al wondered if a recording would be enough, and was annoyed that there was no way to find out.

"Four to a tray — there is a large supply of pots here — compost in the sacks over there — and be careful of the Venomous Tentacula, it's teething."

She gave a sharp slap to a spiky, dark red plant as she spoke, making it draw in the long feelers that had been inching sneakily over her shoulder.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione were joined at their tray by a curly-haired Hufflepuff boy Harry knew by sight but had never spoken to.

"Justin Finch-Fletchley," he said brightly, shaking Harry by the hand. "Know who you are, of course, the famous Harry Potter. … And you're Hermione Granger — always top in everything" (Hermione beamed as she had her hand shaken too) "— and Ron Weasley." (Ron shook his hand, too.)

"That Lockhart's something, isn't he?" said Justin happily as they began filling their plant pots with dragon dung compost.

Before Justin could continue on, Al took over Harry's body and spoke.

"He's something, alright. Something nastier than he claims to be. A liar and a fraud, specifically.

Justin blinked.

"What makes you say that?"

Rather than try to explain a gift that was hard to explain, one that he hadn't run by Dumbledore to see if it, too, was a problem in this world, Al said, "A hunch. The way he talks gives me a distinct vibe of 'Egomaniacal blowhard blowing smoke out his arse.'"

Justin looked annoyed by this, but Al interrupted.

"So, Eaton eh? Impressive."

"Oh. Thanks."

"I know what it's like suddenly finding out you're a wizard. My aunt and uncle never told me I was a wizard, they never spoke of magic being real. If I hadn't accidentally set a snake loose at the zoo, I'd probably be going to school at Stonewall High right now. Thank god for accidental magic, eh?"

They ran out of time to speak, then, because they had to put their earmuffs back on and repot mandrakes.

When they left Herbology for their next class, they caught sight of Lockhart again. Cutting off Ron mid-sentence with the glow of transformation, Zoey suddenly appeared and ran off without explanation.

Hiding behind things, Zoey snuck up on the man, and pointed their wand at his legs when he was facing away, locking his legs in place, which knocked him over. Then she ran off again and rejoined Ron and Hermione.

"What was that all about?" Ron demanded.

"Oh, just taking care of something."

They tried getting more out of her, but she clammed up. They were still trying when they got to Transfiguration.

Today, McGonagall had set them to turning a beetle into a button. While Harry or Iliana would have had a hard time with this, Zoey got hers done on the first try, producing a perfect silver button with a leafy design on it. Even Hermione hadn't managed that, and glared mutinously at her as McGonagall awarded Zoey 10 points for Griffindor.

Ron was having worse problems than usual. His hand-me-down wand, which was so worn that the unicorn hair was visible, was beginning to malfunction. Trying to transfigure his beetle resulted in a cloud of smoke that smelled of rotten eggs, and one very distressed beetle. Zoey gave him a Significant Look, and he gave her an equally Significant answering Look.

At the end of class, Ron was cussing out his wand. Zoey pulled Harry back up to the front, transforming them at the same time.

"Write home for another wand, Ron," Harry said.

"Like my folks could afford one. Even with you paying for the Lockhart books and all."

"And your damned pride doesn't permit you to ask me to pay for it, or to accept if I offered, so soon after that, I suppose?"

Ron's silence was all the affirmative answer Harry needed.

They went down to lunch, where Ron's mood was not improved by Hermione's showing them the handful of perfect coat buttons she had produced in Transfiguration, with a distinct air of trying to either prove herself to them or one-up Zoey. He knew Hermione felt herself a failure if she got anything less quickly than anyone else, but he thought she should have realized Zoey would be a natural at Transfiguration.

"What've we got this afternoon?" said Harry, hastily changing the subject.

"Defense Against the Dark Arts," said Hermione at once.

"Why," demanded Ron, seizing her schedule, "have you outlined all Lockhart's lessons in little hearts?"

Hermione snatched the schedule back, blushing.

"Iliana fancied him at first, too. But then Al looked in the man's eyes and saw he's a lying fraud."

"What's this now?"

"Oh. I don't think I've ever mentioned it to anyone, but might as well mention it to you, Ron, Hermione. Al can look into someone's eyes and usually tell their intentions."

"What, like mind reading?"

"No, more like heart-reading. Like that old saw about the eyes being the windows to the soul."

"You know," Hermione said, her 'I am going to tell you an interesting fact' voice on full, "I've heard that people who've been, you know, abused, or bullied, or both, really, since bullying _is_ abuse, and very few-"

"The point, 'mione?"

She huffed, annoyed.

"Anyway, I've heard that people who've been abused can often read people like that, even without magic. People – humans, anyway – give away a _lot_ of information about their emotional state in their body language, especially their eyes. They can't help it, there's no way to train yourself out of it, because it's just something the body _does_. It makes sense, too, that people who've been abused would develop the ability to read those signs."

"Yeah, come to think of it, I can always tell when Vernon is about to go into a screaming fit. I got good enough at it to sometimes manipulate his emotions to calm down, usually by diverting his attention to something that he didn't feel as strongly about."

His friends looked at him with mixed emotions in their gazes.

"Well, thank goodness I won't need to do that with him again. Nor with any of the Dursleys, come to that. Hey, what's for lunch?"

After lunch, Hermione was reading one of Lockhart's books, and Ron and Harry talked about Quidditch. During the course of it, Harry explained that though he sucked at finding the snitch, he did enjoy flying, the soaring feeling it gave him. But then he felt eyes watching him, and looked in the direction it came from.

Looking up, he saw the very small, mousy-haired boy he'd seen trying on the Sorting Hat last night staring at Harry as though transfixed. He was clutching what looked like an ordinary Muggle camera, and the moment Harry looked at him, he went bright red.

"All right, Harry? I'm — I'm Colin Creevey," he said breathlessly, taking a tentative step forward. "I'm in Gryffindor, too. D'you think — would it be all right if — can I have a picture?" he said, raising the camera hopefully.

"No," Harry said. "I don't like my picture being taken. Sorry, Colin."

"B-but... but you were in the paper the other day!"

"Yeah, and that one was taken against my will. I don't like being famous. I'm famous for something I can't even remember, famous for not dying when my parents did, and it was brand new information to me. How would you feel if, after being told you were a wizard, you were told you were famous for being some kind of weird, unkillable orphan?"

Colin turned redder. "Oh. Hadn't thought of that."

"But hey, if you hang out with us, maybe we can be friends. I wouldn't mind getting in a group picture with friends of mine."

"Oh. Okay."

"Come on, sit down, Colin. We were just talking about Quidditch."

Colin did sit down, but mostly stared, silent and awestruck, at Harry as he and Ron spoke. It was a little unnerving, but not as bad as having his picture taken.

Halfway through the conversation, Malfoy ambled by with a group of other Slytherins.

"Well if it isn't Hairy Potty," Malfoy sneered. "Smarming up to your fanboys, are you Potty? Maybe I should go fetch the Weasley bird, I hear she's got a shrine to you in her bedroom. You can start a fan club."

Harry raised an eyebrow as Malfoy and his admirers laughed at his poor excuse for wit.

"You know, Malfoy, from the first time I met you, you reminded me of my cousin Dudley, only a lot smaller. You're spoiled rotten just like him, and every time you talk I get this strong feeling of 'Why can't everything always be about me?' from you. You're worse than Lockhart in that respect; at least he's got his books to gain him attention, whereas you're just a homesick kid who's out of his element and lonely because of it. If you want me to be your friend, Malfoy, I suggest you stop bullying people, especially me and my friends."

Malfoy glared at this. The other Slytherins snorted with repressed laughter, which didn't help his mood. He glared first at them, and then sneered at Harry. "I wouldn't want to be your friend, Potty; you associate with Muggles and their half-breed spawn," he said, indicating Colin and Hermione.

Recalling the conversation he overheard between Draco and his father, Harry smirked.

"Oh, I see. How could I forget that you always want your daddy's approval? And the fact that Daddy Malfoy expects better of his high-born son than to be outperformed in classes by a Muggle-born witch?"

Draco went deathly pale at these words. "How did you...? I mean..."

"Accidentally ended up getting out at the wrong grate over the summer, overheard a very interesting conversation involving your father, you, and a certain store clerk after hiding in a cabinet."

"Figures you would be hiding and eavesdropping on other people's conversations, Potter."

"Well it was either that or be at the mercy of two – possibly three – people who hate me, in an unfamiliar place. What would you have done?"

He sneered again. "I thought you Griffindors were supposed to be brave?"

"Brave yes. Stupid, no. Your father was suspected of being in league with Voldemort. Couldn't risk being around him in a situation like that. I thought cunning was a Slytherin trait. Aren't you a Slytherin?"

"Are you making accusations against my father?"

"Figures that would be the only part of what I said to get your attention. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. But paranoia is a survival trait, when there are people after one's blood. So I'll gladly err on the side of paranoia, even if it means you take offense at it."

"Ho ho, what's all this now, boys?" a disgustingly familiar voice cut in. They all looked up to see Lockhart's grinning git face. "What seems to be the disturbance?"

"Nothing, Professor," smarmed Malfoy. "Just having a conversation with Potter. Talking about his fan club."

"Fan club? Oh Harry, Harry," Lockhart said sadly. "And here I thought our earlier conversation had gotten through to you."

"He's making stuff up, Professor. I don't have a fan club, and I don't want one."

"Now now, Harry, there's no need to lie to Gilderoy Lockhart. I know how seductive fame can be, boy. But you're getting ahead of yourself, as I said before."

Malfoy glanced at Colin's camera.

"You don't know the half of it, Professor Lockhart. Colin came here to get signed photos from Potter."

"Signed photos? Well, Mr. Creevy, if you must. But here, let's get the both of us, make the picture even more valuable."

 _Oh you wanna play that game, do you?_ Harry heard Zoey think.

"But Harry doesn't want-" Colin began to say.

"Nonsense, my dear boy, nonsense! Why-"

But whatever he was going to say got cut off as Zoey appeared in a glow of white light. She stood up primly, the picture of innocence.

"Professor Lockhart, sir. Mr. Malfoy just didn't want to admit to being a huge fan of yours, because otherwise your attention would surely leave him very embarrassed. He's always talking about how brave you are, how handsome you are, and how he wants to be _just like you_ when he grows up. He was hoping that getting a signed photo from Harry would give him the excuse he needed to get one from you, but he's not really interested in Harry, just in you, Professor."

She wrinkled her nose in concentration, then pulled from behind her back a parchment that hadn't been there before.

"Look, see, he was having us proofread some fanmail he wanted to send to you," she said, handing Lockhart the parchment.

"Oh my, really?" Lockhart beamed. Malfoy looked confused, then angry as a wolverine at Zoey, who grinned innocently back at him. "Well," Lockhart continued, "I am touched. Thrilled to meet such fans as you, Mr. Malfoy."

"Read the letter aloud, Professor, I know he'd want you to."

"Really? Oh okay, if he wants it so badly I guess I have no choice," Lockhart said, beaming like never before.

Malfoy's face went panicky, and he ran to try to grab the parchment out of Lockhart's hand. The other Slytherins turned their noses up at this undignified display of panic. Lockhart smiled indulgently, holding the letter higher than Malfoy could reach.

"Now now, Mr. Malfoy, you'll get it back when I've read it and signed it for you. Let's see, yes," he began, reading out.

"Dear Gilderoy Lockhart, I am your #1 fan. I own every book you've ever written, and the walls of my bedroom at home and my dorm room in Hogwarts are simply _plastered_ with posters of your amazing face. I even wear your personal brand of underpants every day of the week..."

Ron and Hermione began laughing so hard that they were both beet red and having difficulty breathing. Colin just stood there, transfixed. Zoey took the opportunity to drag her two friends away from the fiasco, even though she wanted to stay and listen, and watch as Draco's face went red enough to set the grass on fire, still desperately trying to get the fake letter away from Lockhart.

Not being able to get them all the way back into the castle, Zoey settled for getting them into Hagrid's hut; even that seemed to be assisted by wandless magic. Hagrid looked at them as they came in, bewildered, and tried to speak, but Zoey hushed him politely, telling him they needed time to recover from a hilarious sight.

"Oh my god, Zoey," Ron said at last, clutching a stitch in his side. "That was brilliant!"

"I agree... though you shouldn't have," Hermione said, once she got her wits about her. "Malfoy's bound to be furious, now."

"I did it as a diversion, to get us away from Lockhart and Malfoy both," Zoey explained. "And who knows? Maybe if he's mortified enough, he'll think twice before picking on us."

"I dunno. He's pretty thick, mate."

Zoey transformed back into Harry, and they left for Defense Against the Dark Arts.

Lockhart's idea of a Defense class turned out to be a ridiculous waste of time. He started out giving a quiz about his books, supposedly just to see how much they'd already taken in, which turned out to be all about him, with nothing at all about Defense. Even Iliana was starting to feel Lockhart was a blowhard, and was rapidly losing interest in his ridiculous egotistical face. Hermione, however, was still under the man's spell, getting every question right and appearing smitten by him still, which figured; Hermione had an unhealthy level of respect for rules and authority, such that they wondered if she realized that authority comes from people, and that people are fallable and thus are often wrong. And anyone who wrote a book, no matter how obviously full of tripe they were, was automatically an authority to Hermione. The fact that Dumbledore had, for whatever reason, decided to let this strutting, brainless peacock in as a teacher just made it worse. It made Harry feel better for not having even looked at the books once since getting them.

 _ **Dumbledore must be mad as a hatter to let this guy teach anything, let alone Defense,**_ Alastair thought snidely at Harry. Harry privately agreed.

Lockhart was now bending over a covered cage. Very dramatically, building up their suspense and nearly scaring Neville off his chair, he finally tore off the cover to reveal... Cornish pixies.

Like tiny winged, blue people with odd faces and squeaky voices, the pixies looked very excitable. But, as Seamus Finnegan pointed out in near hysterical laughter, they didn't look terribly dangerous. However, when the idiot released them into the room, they began flying everywhere destroying everything they could find, resulting in utter bedlam. Lockhart tried dealing with them himself, but the only effect his spell had was to annoy one of the pixies into stealing his wand and chucking it out the window, at which point he just took off running.

Harry ducked behind some furniture with Ron and Hermione, and took advantage of Al's fascination with hexes to blast the little things out of the air with a spell he was fairly sure wouldn't hurt them much, but there were so many of them that even with Hermione doing the same spell, that didn't help much.

Then matters were made worse when Ron tried to help, for instead of knocking out the pixies, the spell from the aging wand backfired on him, knocking him out. Several people, Harry included, tripped over Ron before they realized what had happened, which distracted them long enough that the pixies picked up Neville by his robes and hung him from a chandelier. Harry was astonished; he hadn't thought the pixies knew how to cooperate and focus on something long enough to do that.

Hermione focused on trying to rescue Neville while Harry kept knocking out pixies. Dean, who had also lost his wand, went around picking up the pixies Harry had knocked out and returning them to their cage.

Once Neville was freed, Hermione and Harry worked double-time until at last the pixies were all contained. They woke up Ron with a few shakes, and together they left the room.

"Can you believe him?" roared Ron as they walked the corridor.

"He just wants to give us some hands-on experience," said Hermione, immobilizing two pixies at once with a clever Freezing Charm and stuffing them back into their cage.

"Hands on?" said Harry, who was trying to grab a pixie dancing out of reach with its tongue out. "Hermione, he didn't have a clue what he was doing —"

"Rubbish," said Hermione. "You've read his books — look at all those amazing things he's done —"

"He says he's done," Ron muttered.

"I agree," Harry said. "If he couldn't even handle pixies, I don't see him being able to handle werewolves, trolls, or vampires. And anyone can write a book, doesn't make it true. Even if someone's duped into publishing it."

Hermione blushed, but said nothing more.

On Friday morning, Ron's decrepit wand, which hadn't done anything right in days, malfunctioned in a truly spectacular way as it shot out of his hand and gave Professor Flitwick a nasty green boil between his eyes.

"Okay, that's it," Harry said, "you need a new wand."

"Yeah, I do. But we can't get one anytime soon. If only it'd started doing this before school started. But we're not old enough to go to Hogmeade yet, and the next chance to go to Diagon Alley isn't til the Christmas holidays. But I think I can last til then."

"Ron, that wand is a menace to everything and everyone around it. I can owl-order you a new one."

"Ollivander says the wand chooses the wizard," Ron said.

"And yet here you are with a hand-me-down wand, that was working fine until recently. But that thing is so dangerous now that everybody knows it. The other day, you pointed it at Scabbers, and he woke up from his nap right away and took off running. So even your rat knows to avoid your wand."

"No, Harry. It works sometimes. You just don't notice when it does because-"

"Because I'm so focused on the times when it nearly destroys something or someone?"

"Well I have to at least discuss it with Mum. They might have the money to replace it themselves, and as it's not exactly an emergency..."

"When is it going to qualify as an emergency, though? When it takes someone's leg off?"

But Ron was insistent that it still wasn't an emergency, and therefore didn't need replacing yet. Harry sighed, wondering how Ron could be so delusional, but saying nothing more.

On Saturday, the three of them planned to go down to Hagrid's, but Harry found himself being shaken awake at the asscrack of dawn by Oliver Wood.

"Quidditch practice!" Wood barked. "You need to be Iliana."

Grumbling, Harry said, "Don't worry. We know how to control it now. But I need breakfast first."

"Forget that, Harry, you can eat later. We need to get ahead of everyone else to win this year, and that means getting onto the pitch as early as we can. Don't waste time, just get dressed, transform, and come down to the pitch."

Harry considered hexing Wood, but did as he was told. Zoey whined at being woken up so early, but triggered the transformation to Iliana with an annoyed grunt all the same. She got on her Quidditch robes, grabbed her broom, and headed down to the pitch.

As she left, she ran into Colin Creevy, who was saying something about Harry. He fell short when he saw her, then stared at her scar, his eyes going wide.

"Oh, you're Iliana Potter, aren't you? I haven't met you yet. I'm Colin Creevy. Hey, do you mind if I go down with you and take some photos? I've never seen Quidditch before!"

 _Oh lovely,_ she thought. _He's a morning person._

 _ **Damn, and I left the rifle at home,**_ Al thought back at her.

"Yeah okay, I suppose I can't stop you."

"You were the youngest House player in a hundred years, weren't you, Iliana? Weren't you?" said Colin, trotting alongside him. "You must be brilliant. I've never flown. Is it easy? Is that your own broom? Is that the best one there is?"

Iliana didn't know how to get rid of him. It was like having an extremely talkative shadow. All she could really think to do was to answer his questions as succinctly as possible. But when he ran out of Quidditch questions, he began asking about their collective.

"So I know you and Harry, but who else is in there? Do you think there'll be any more people showing up? Why are there so many people in one body anyway? How does that work?"

"No idea why we're a Multiple collective. I really hope no more are going to show up, it's already crowded enough in here with five people."

"Who-" he began, but she cut him off.

"There's me, Harry, Alastair – he's older looking and has long black hair, then Zoey – who's younger, about 6 years old, and finally Tier. He doesn't seem to have his own specific appearance, at least not so far."

Wearily answering more questions than she ever wanted to hear, Iliana was very glad when she was able to leave him behind to go into the changing rooms, even though she had already changed, in more ways than one.

Alas, she had traded an exasperating little kid for an older boy who was exasperating in a whole other way, and boring to boot, as Wood got them all together in front of a chalkboard and began regaling them with Quidditch tactics til several people on the team were falling asleep. This did not please Wood at all.

"I've got a question, Oliver," said George, who had woken with a start. "Why couldn't you have told us all this yesterday when we were awake?"

Wood wasn't pleased.

"Now, listen here, you lot," he said, glowering at them all. "We should have won the Quidditch Cup last year. We're easily the best team. But unfortunately — owing to circumstances beyond our control —"

Iliana felt both guilty and annoyed. Guilty because she'd been knocked out and that had cost them the game and the Cup. Annoyed because A. She couldn't help that, and B. It was Wood's own fault for not training a reserve Seeker.

"Wood," she said. "I'm not going to be made to feel guilty just because you couldn't be arsed to train a reserve Seeker."

The Weasley twins snickered at this.

"Is that you, Al?"

"No," Iliana said. "He and I just have similar attitudes after being dragged out of bed at Bugger O'Clock in the morning to listen to something we could barely understand when properly awake."

Wood glared at her, and everyone else for laughing. When they'd stopped, and he'd regained control of himself, he spoke again.

"Anyway, this year, we train harder than ever before. … Okay, let's go and put our new theories into practice!" Wood shouted, seizing his broomstick and leading the way out of the locker rooms. Stiff-legged and still yawning, his team followed.

 _'What is going on, human?'_ asked Aqua, startling Iliana, who had forgotten she still had the snake on her arm. She fell back and looked around carefully, then whispered, _'Sorry, explain later. Maybe you should go hunting.'_

 _'Okay,'_ the snake agreed, slithering down onto the ground.

Iliana looked around again. Nobody appeared to have seen or heard anything unusual, which was good.

They'd been in there so long the sun was properly up all the way, and Ron and Hermione had joined Colin in the stands.

"Aren't you done yet?" Ron asked.

"Haven't even started yet," Iliana grumbled. "Wood's been going over tactics with us."

They began practice, the wind from flying making Iliana feel loads better, more awake. She went immediately into the act of hunting for the snitch, ignoring the clicking of Colin's camera. Wood, however, could not ignore it, and eventually commented on it. She had to reassure him that Colin was a Griffindor. He had been convinced the boy was a Slytherin spy.

The Slytherins didn't need a spy, however, because the whole team was headed right for them. Smelling danger, the Griffindor team followed their captain to confront Flint, the Slytherin captain.

"Flint!" Wood bellowed at the Slytherin Captain. "This is our practice time! We got up specially! You can clear off now!"

Marcus Flint was even larger than Wood. He had a look of trollish cunning on his face as he replied, "Plenty of room for all of us, Wood."

"But I booked the field!" said Wood, positively spitting with rage. "I booked it!"

"Ah," said Flint. "But I've got a specially signed note here from Professor Snape. 'I, Professor S. Snape, give the Slytherin team permission to practice today on the Quidditch field owing to the need to train their new Seeker.' "

"You've got a new Seeker?" said Wood, distracted. "Where?"

And from behind the six large figures before them came a seventh, smaller boy, smirking all over his pale, pointed face. It was Draco Malfoy.

 _ **Why am I not surprised?**_ thought Al.

 _Little shit bought his way onto the team,_ thought Harry. _Look, his father's bought the whole team new brooms. Puts them at an unfair advantage._ Iliana nodded, forgetting only she could hear them at the moment.

The argument continued, and Iliana wasn't surprised when Ron and Hermione joined to see what all the fuss was about.

"What's happening?" Ron asked Iliana. "Why aren't you playing? And what's he doing here?"

He was looking at Malfoy, taking in his Slytherin Quidditch robes.

"I'm the new Slytherin Seeker, Weasley," said Malfoy, smugly. "Everyone's just been admiring the brooms my father's bought our team."

Ron gaped, openmouthed, at the seven superb broomsticks in front of him.

"Good, aren't they?" said Malfoy smoothly. "But perhaps the Gryffindor team will be able to raise some gold and get new brooms, too. You could raffle off those Cleansweep Fives; I expect a museum would bid for them."

The Slytherin team howled with laughter. But Al was grinning internally with a sudden inspiration.

 _ **The idiot's just given me a great idea**_ , Al thought at the others. _ **'Perhaps the Griffindor team can get new brooms too.' Yes, Malfoy, we're going to do exactly that. Same make and model, too. Don't tell him, though, I want it to be a surprise.**_

 _And better yet, let's get new brooms for all the school teams, nullify their advantage completely._

 _ **Great thinking, Harry.**_

"At least no one on the Gryffindor team had to buy their way in," said Hermione sharply. "They got in on pure talent."

The smug look on Malfoy's face flickered. Iliana grinned.

"No one asked your opinion, you filthy little Mudblood," he spat.

 _ **Well that sounds like a very rude word,**_ Al thought.

 _And look at them all shouting in rage, that must be the wizarding equivalent of the n-word,_ thought Harry.

The whole fight happened so quickly that almost as soon as Harry stopped thinking those words, Ron had attempted to hex Malfoy, but his aged and doddering old wand blew up in his own face, leaving him puking up slugs onto the grass.

"Shit," Iliana said, grabbing Ron and dragging him off toward Hagrid's, hoping the large man would know what to do.

"What happened, Iliana? What happened? Is he ill? But you can cure him, can't you?" Colin had run down from his seat and was now dancing alongside them as they left the field. Ron gave a huge heave and more slugs dribbled down his front.

"Oooh," said Colin, fascinated and raising his camera. "Can you hold him still, Iliana?"

"This isn't the time or place, Colin!" Iliana snapped at the boy.

Between her and Hermione, they managed to drag the increasingly green looking Ron to Hagrid's hut.

They were within twenty feet of Hagrid's house when the front door opened, but it wasn't Hagrid who emerged. Gilderoy Lockhart, wearing robes of palest mauve today, came striding out.

"Oh hell no," Iliana and Al said in unison, trying to figure out a way to avoid Lockhart and get to Hagrid at the same time. They managed to duck behind some weeds to wait the buffoon out. Once he was gone, they continued on to Hagrid's.

Getting there at last, they knocked urgently.

Hagrid appeared at once, looking very grumpy, but his expression brightened when he saw who it was.

"Bin wonderin' when you'd come ter see me — come in, come in — thought you mighta bin Professor Lockhart back again —"

"We feel your pain, Hagrid. But right now we're more concerned with Ron's," Iliana said.

"Better out than in," he said cheerfully, plunking a large copper basin in front of him. "Get 'em all up, Ron."

"I don't think there's anything to do except wait for it to stop," said Hermione anxiously, watching Ron bend over the basin. "That's a difficult curse to work at the best of times, but with a malfunctioning wand..."

"So what was that word that got everyone so riled up? Must've been pretty bad."

"It was bad," said Ron hoarsely, emerging over the tabletop looking pale and sweaty. "Malfoy called her 'Mudblood,' Hagrid —"

Ron dived out of sight again as a fresh wave of slugs made their appearance. Hagrid looked outraged, and verbally abused Malfoy for using the word.

"It's a vile word," Ron said, explaining. "Means 'dirty blood,' because Muggles are scum to people like him. Load of rubbish, of course. There aren't any true purebloods left, if there ever were any to begin with; everyone has some Muggle in them. If we hadn't married Muggles, we'd have died out ages ago. And anyway, blood purity doesn't affect ability at all. Look at Neville, he's a pureblood, and can hardly do anything right. And Hermione's Muggle-born and probably couldn't fail at anything if she tried."

Hermione blushed at this and tried to protest, but Hagrid – who hadn't noticed – but her off.

"Well, I don' blame yeh fer tryin' ter curse him, Ron," said Hagrid loudly over the thuds of more slugs hitting the basin. "Bu' maybe it was a good thing yer wand backfired. 'Spect Lucius Malfoy would've come marchin' up ter school if yeh'd cursed his son. Least yer not in trouble."

"Not any more trouble than belching slugs, anyway," Al quipped with Iliana's voice.

"Anyway, Iliana," Hagrid said in a blatant attempt to change the subject, "got a bone ter pick with yeh. Heard you've been giving out signed photos. Why ent I got one yet?"

She felt her face go hot, and began stammering a response when Hagrid laughed.

"Jus kiddin! Nah, I don't believe a word that Lockhart says bout nuthin."

They continued with some idle chitchat for a while, about Lockhart mainly, in which they found out from Hagrid that literally nobody else wanted the DADA job because of rumors it was cursed. After Quirrell dying, Iliana didn't blame them. She felt panic start to rise in her at the thought of Quirrell, and the thought of how she'd been forgetting about what she'd done, how she should be atoning more for her sins. Luckily, the conversation continued, and Iliana – feeling horrible no matter what – went along with the change and tried to put the thought of Quirrell out of her mind, which wasn't easy.

At some point, Hagrid showed them some enormous pumpkins that he'd apparently been using his pink umbrella (that was, by this admission, obviously an illegal wand) on. Iliana found herself wondering what Hagrid had done that was bad enough to get expelled and his wand snapped in half, and him forbidden to use it legally, but of course he wouldn't discuss it, so she didn't bother to ask.

But the thoughts of Quirrell wouldn't go away. They were drowning her. Her heart was racing, and she was breathing too fast. Hermione looked at her curiously, and that look was like the proverbial straw on the camel's back. Unable to cope, she retreated to her hiding place within, which forced a transformation back to Harry.

Hagrid, who still hadn't gotten used to these transformatons, gave a start at this. But Ron and Hermione barely even blinked.

"Well you've done well on your pumpkins," Hermione said, continuing where she'd left off.

"That's what yer little sister said," said Hagrid, nodding at Ron. "Met her jus' yesterday." Hagrid looked sideways at Harry, his beard twitching. "Said she was jus' lookin' round the grounds, but I reckon she was hopin' she might run inter someone else at my house." He winked at Harry. "If yeh ask me, she wouldn' say no ter a signed —"

"Oh shut it," Harry snapped, making everyone laugh.

Then, suddenly remembering something, he said, "Be right back," and went running back to the Quidditch pitch, hunting around for Zoey's snake. After several minutes of looking, and calling out for her in Parseltongue, Aqua finally emerged.

 _'There you are, human. I've been looking all over for you. I ate a mouse, and then came back and you weren't here.'_

 _'Sorry about that, Aqua. My friend Ron got sick. As soon as he was taken care of, I came back looking for you.'_

 _'I am glad. You are warm. I think next time I will fly with you instead of hunting, though.'_

When they got back into the castle later, Ron had the misfortune of running right into Filch and having a slug attack all over the man's clothes. After a lot of yelling and screaming, Filch grabbed both him and Harry and dragged them into his office. Harry tried to protest that he'd done nothing wrong, and that Ron couldn't help his slug attack, but the man was too livid to listen, even if he'd ever been so inclined. He assigned them both detentions, cleaning the trophies in the trophy room without magic. He would listen to no protests, so they went to McGonagall.

Finding her in a corridor, they explained everything. Most unfortunately, Lockhart overheard and insisted on taking Harry's detention, to help him answer his fan mail. Harry tried to beg McGonagall not to allow it, but she did. Their detentions would be served tonight.

As time was wont to do whenever he had something unpleasant ahead of him, the afternoon slipped away all too quickly, and Harry found himself in Lockhart's office, set to the mind-numbing task of addressing envelopes. What was most annoying was that if it had been cleaning, Harry could have just set a part of his mind he'd taken to calling the Automaton to the task, and just daydreamed about whatever he wanted as it toiled away. He'd gotten through many tedious hours at the Dursleys that way, trading in the tedium for a sort of fast-forwarding of time from being barely aware of what his body was doing. But this task required more thought than the mindless Automaton could manage, so time was going to drag on like a zombie begging to be put out of its misery.

Still, there was a different sort of coping mechanism for the tedium, as his brain became torpid and stupid under the crushing weight of the tedious task and Lockhart's pointless nattering. He set the Automaton to nodding and making noncommittal noses in the right places as he focused on addressing the envelopes, and as such, not a single word Lockhart said got past the ramparts of his Automaton and into the castle of any of their conscious minds.

And then the Automaton was poking them to get their attention, for it was hearing something its simplistic programming couldn't identify. Not the sounds of the candles, and not Lockhart's prattle, it was a cold, cruel voice that chilled them all to the marrow.

 _'Come … come to me. … Let me rip you. … Let me tear you. … Let me kill you...'_

He gave a start, looking around for the source of the voice.

"What was that voice?"

Lockhart blinked. "Sorry? What voice?"

"That — that voice that said — didn't you hear it?"

Lockhart was looking at Harry in high astonishment.

"What are you talking about, Harry? Perhaps you're getting a little drowsy? Great Scott — look at the time! "We've been here nearly four hours! I'd never have believed it — the time's flown, hasn't it?"

The brain torpor from earlier had evaporated completely, and now all five of them were on high alert. Tier was so keyed up that Harry heard himself growl, which got a strange look from Lockhart.

"Harry?"

But Harry wasn't in control anymore. Tier was more alert than any of them, and Harry's body glowed, but didn't outwardly change, as Tier took over. The animal-like Tier sniffed around, unnerving Lockhart, and took off out the door.

Tier was hunting. For what, he knew not. But that smell... dusty and old, yet alive. It smelled of venom, it smelled of decay and blood, it smelled of great power. It was _dangerous_ , whatever it was.

But then the smell was gone. The voice was gone. Tier waited, still as stone, for he knew not how long. Finally, though, he gave up. With an annoyed huff of air, Tier changed the body back to its normal sensory configuration, and put Harry back in the driver's seat. Frightened, Harry bolted for the Griffindor common room.

Ron began regaling him with the tale of his own detention and how he'd vomited slugs over some of the trophies, blithe at first to Harry's upset, but eventually he noticed and asked about it. Harry explained what happened as well as he could, quietly enough to not disturb the other boys, who were asleep.

"And Lockhart said he couldn't hear it?" said Ron. Harry could see him frowning in the moonlight. "D'you think he was lying? But I don't get it — even someone invisible would've had to open the door."

"I know," said Harry, lying back in his four-poster and staring at the canopy above him. "I don't get it either."

End note: Thanks, everyone, for all the praise, the follows, and the kudos! I'm glad to know so many people are having fun reading this. I sure am having fun writing it. In fact, as of the time I'm writing this end note, I've already got chapter 8 done, too, and started on chapter 9. Chapter 8 just needs proofing. Though I'm not going to release these chapters any faster than once a week, just in case I hit any writer's blocks or depressive episodes. That way I might be able to work up a backlog to release until I get my mojo back, if that happens.


	8. The Chamber of Secrets Opens

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 8"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Eight: The Chamber of Secrets Opens

Note: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

The next morning, Harry sat in bed for an unknown amount of time pondering Malfoy's having bought his way onto the Slytherin team. It really was an unfair advantage. He considered, for a time, just complaining about it, but what would that really accomplish?

 _ **Well, are you forgetting about that 13 million galleon inheritance?**_ Al pointed out to him.

"Ah," he said very quietly aloud. "Brilliant, Al!"

Harry got up at once and started to write a letter to Quality Quidditch Supplies in London, since he didn't know if there was any kind of similar shop in Hogsmeade. Once he finished it, he got dressed in slacks and a blue top, and headed up to the owlery to find Hedwig. She blinked sleepily at him. To get on her good side, he petted her and gave her some owl treats. Appeased, she let him tie the letter to her leg, tell her where to go, and watched her fly off. That settled, he went down to breakfast.

He was halfway through a second helping of kippers and eggs when Ron showed up.

"Hey mate. Not practicing today?"

"If I am, Wood hasn't told me yet."

"Maybe Wood's still sore about Malfoy."

Harry considered telling Ron his plan, but decided it was too early. And Ron reacted to things concerning money in strange and sometimes unpredictable ways, so he decided to leave it be for now.

"Yeah, can you believe the nerve of that berk? I don't think buying one team – and only one team – new brooms is fair."

"Ah regum weh shud gomflaim," Ron said, his face stuffed like a chipmunk preparing for winter. Harry gave him a disgusted look.

"Well we can try, but I doubt there's any rule against it."

Ron swallowed before speaking, for once. "Is Zoey gonna get back at Malfoy?"

His legs uncrossing and re-crossing in his seat and his head cocked upward with a mysterious smile on his face, Harry said, "We have a plan. But we don't know how it will work, so we're not telling you what it is until we're sure we've got things set up."

Ron chuckled. "Is it gonna be amazing?"

"Malfoy will be knocked down several pegs, maybe even a dozen pegs, if it works."

Hermione came into the Great Hall then, and the two of them looked up at her. They gave one another a quick glance that said they weren't going to tell Hermione anything of this, because she'd just nag them about it, even without having a clue what Harry was up to.

She must have thought something was up, though, because she stopped in place and stared at Harry with an odd expression on her face. For some reason, her eyes flicked down to his legs. Completely bewildered, he turned back to his food.

When Hermione sat down, she asked, "Iliana?"

Harry blinked at her.

"No, it's Harry. Why?"

"Oh. It's just, sometimes you don't transform. And well... never mind. Ah, bacon!"

Hermione started piling food on her plate, seeming more like Ron than Hermione, at least until she started eating.

Try as he might, Harry had a hard time keeping from Hermione that he was planning something. This time, her suspicions had very little evidence beyond Harry being very secretive about his letters. Ron was disappointed that Harry was keeping the letters secret from him, as he figured they had something to do with the plan – given that Harry's only regular correspondence was from Hagrid. But Harry was adamant about keeping it a secret until the big reveal.

The first Quidditch practice after the incident with the Slytherins was the following Saturday. It was an experience, Wood being more ferocious than ever in training, as though he could compensate for Slytherin's unfair advantage with pure force of will. Iliana didn't tell him that they had a meeting this afternoon that would pave the way towards Wood feeling better. Though they'd meant to tell Ron and Hermione once Harry had set up this meeting, they decided their friends would be better off as surprised as everyone else.

Ron and Hermione stared in bewilderment at Harry at lunch as he wolfed down his food like he'd been starving for a week, rushing off and nearly running headlong into a pale and sickly looking Ginny in the doorway.

"Oh, sorry Ginny," he said as she turned redder than her hair.

"W-wait!" she called back as he exited the Great Hall.

He stopped in confusion, turning around. Ginny did not speak, but she held out a sealed letter for him.

"Oh, thanks Ginny," he said, unsealing the letter and seeing familiar thin, slanting writing.

It was a note from Dumbledore, who was calling Harry up to his office. Harry grinned, guessing what this was about, and walked as fast as he could to the headmaster's office.

"Chocolate frogs," Harry told the gargoyle, which leapt aside at the password.

Harry got on the moving staircase, climbing the steps to make the trip even faster. He had his hand up to knock when the door opened, Dumbledore smiling and twinkling at him.

"Hello there, my dear lad. It seems you have a visitor. And given who he is, and what he's told me of the nature of his visit, I have a private room just over here, that you can use," Dumbledore said, unhinging a bookcase so it swung out.

The man, middle aged with thinning brown hair, held out his hand. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Potter. I understand you want to make an order?"

"Yes; yes, I would."

"Well let's get down to business, then."

They stepped into the private room, closing the bookcase behind them, and sat facing one another at a table with two chairs.

"So you said in your letters that you wanted to make a large purchase for donation to the school?"

"Yes. I'm sure you're aware of Mr. Malfoy's generous contribution to the Slytherin Quidditch team?"

"Ah yes, I figured he was buying seven Nimbus 2001s for something like this. It's not very often we get mass orders for brooms. The professional teams get theirs from us, of course, but all our brooms are guaranteed good for 10 years at least. So, did you want to order 7 of the same for the Griffindor team?"

"No. I want to order 30 of them. That makes seven for each of the remaining three teams, and nine spares for stuff like teaching first years to fly."

The shopkeeper's eyes went wide in shock, before his face widened into an excited grin. " _Thirty_ broomsticks? Same model as Mr. Malfoy?"

"Yes. All four teams should be on equal speed footing. How much will the order cost?"

"Well, the Nimbus 2001 is 35 galleons. That would mean 1,050 galleons for the lot, except that there's a bulk discount. With the discount included, that brings your total to just 1,000 galleons."

"Sounds good to me. Can you make sure the donor is anonymous?"

"You... don't want credit for the donation?"

"No. I don't like being famous. I'd rather not draw more attention to myself."

"What about Dumbledore?"

"The headmaster knows how to be discreet. I'll let him know my wishes before I leave. So can you do it?"

"Yes, I can – and will – do that for you."

"Excellent. When can I expect the delivery?"

"I can have them delivered here by next Saturday, Mr. Potter."

Harry's face twitched a little, but he smiled and began filling out the Gringott's check for the agreed amount. He handed it to the shopkeeper, who beamed at him and shook his hand.

"Thank you very much, Mr. Potter, you've made my year, you have. If you ever need something again, don't hesitate to ask."

"You're welcome," Harry said, and bid the man farewell.

When they got out of the small room, Dumbledore twinkled at Harry.

"Making a charitable donation to the school to one-up young Mr. Malfoy?" Dumbledore asked jovially.

 _ **I swear to Merlin, that man can read minds,**_ Al thought at him.

 _Must be quite the experience reading_ _our_ _minds,_ Harry thought back at him.

"Yes, headmaster. Only, I want to keep the origin of the broomsticks a secret."

"Ah, then in that case I have no idea whatsoever of what you are talking about, and I shall be ever so surprised if someone were to give the school a gift."

"Thanks, sir."

Dumbledore smiled at him again, and Harry left the room feeling very smug.

The next week was an agony of waiting and trying to shake off Ron's questions. Even worse, Hermione had figured out he was up to something and was assuming the worst, nagging him frequently about it. It was no good trying to get her to stop, nothing he said short of revealing the surprise would quell her, and Ron would kill him if he told Hermione before he told Ron. So he kept trying to insist he wasn't doing anything wrong, and assure her she'd feel foolish when things finally unfolded. She was not, however, convinced by this, so he took to ignoring her instead.

On Friday afternoon, both their nagging changed from deeply annoying to extremely amusing, as he knew it would happen tomorrow. When exactly, he wasn't sure, but one way or another it would finally be over.

Wood had woken him up early Saturday morning, and excitedly he had Zoey switch them to Iliana before going down to breakfast.

Whenever they'd thought the order would come, they hadn't counted on it being at breakfast that morning. But that is exactly when Mr. Filch came into the Great Hall with four unfamiliar wizards in tow, guiding several large crates floating along with their wands. The teachers, the Griffindor Quidditch team, and the few other people already down in the Great Hall rubbernecked like mad, trying to figure out what was going on. Professor McGonagall, looking bewildered, put down her napkin and walked up to the men.

"These men have a delivery for the school, marm," Filch said.

One of the wizards set his crate down and tipped his hat. "Greetings, Professor. I'm Simon Monroe from Quality Quidditch Supplies. We're here to deliver a charitable donation to the school of 30 Nimbus 2001s."

McGonagall looked like a fish out of water as she gaped at this. Everyone else in hearing range, save for those who already knew about the delivery, gaped as well.

"Thirty... did you say 30 broomsticks?"

"Yes. Thirty Nimbus 2001s. Seven each for Griffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff Quidditch teams, seeing as Slytherin already bought some of their own. The remaining nine are spares, which you can use at your discretion. Though the donor suggested using them to train first years how to fly."

"And who is this donor?"

"The donor wished to remain anonymous, Professor. But my boss knows who it is, as he negotiated the sale with the donor personally. Now, where should we put them?"

Ron and Hermione rounded on Iliana, who was finding it hard to hold back her laughter.

"Later," Iliana told them, trying not to grin. "After practice."

Wood was, of course, delighted by the donation, as were others on the team whose own brooms were rather old and battered. The practice that day consisted of an hour of everyone just zooming around on the Nimbus 2001s – Iliana preferring her own Nimbus 2000 – before they were settled down enough to get to actually practicing.

Nobody seemed to know who the donor was, except the Weasley Twins, who had a shrewd idea Iliana was behind it. They knew, after all, that the Potter collective were rich, after all. But after practice was over and they and Iliana were the only ones still at the Quidditch pitch, they cornered her.

"Hey, thanks for the broomsticks, Iliana," said George.

"I'm sure I have no idea what you mean," Iliana said in faux innocence.

Fred winked at her. "Right, you don't know any more than we do who the donor was. Should've known. Oh well, I guess if I thank enough people, I might thank the donor eventually."

The best part, of course, was catching glimpses of Malfoy's sour face as he tried to look inconspicuous spying on the Griffindor team.

As October came around, the weather got cold and wet and muddy. If anyone thought this would make Wood give them a weekend off from training, though, they were wrong. And so it was that Iliana found herself coming in from the muddy weather one day. Out of consideration for the grumpy old Filch, she was Vanishing the mud as best she could. She was so distracted by this that she walked through Nearly Headless Nick, which was like falling into a sudden cold spot.

For what it was worth, he appeared to be as distracted as she was. She caught a few words he was muttering to himself before he realized what was going on, something about 'don't fulfill their requirements' and 'half an inch if that,' comments that made Al snicker internally.

"Oh! Sorry my dear, didn't mean to walk into you."

"It's fine, I wasn't paying attention."

"You look troubled, young Potter."

"No, I'm just exhausted from practice. But you seem troubled, too"

"Oh, a matter of no importance. It's not like I really wanted to join them, the puffed up... but I don't fulfill their requirements. I'd show them fulfilled requirements if I weren't a man of peace."

 _ **Somebody's got sour grapes,**_ Al thought at Iliana.

"But you would think, would you not, that getting hit in the neck 45 times with a blunt axe would qualify you for the Headless Hunt."

 _ **TMI, dude,**_ Al thought. Iliana ignored him.

"Oh, uh. Yeah. Yes. Quite."

He went on about the Headless Hunt, which was fascinating if a little gross. Headless ghosts from all corners gathering for fun and games like Head Polo. But Nick was mostly complaining about the head headless ghost, Sir Patrick Delaney-Podmore. Or, as he called the ghost to Al's delight, "Sir Properly-Decapitated Podmore."

Suddenly, a familiar pair of amber eyes appeared. Mrs. Norris, Mr. Filch's cat, had spotted the mud she was tracking in and running off to fetch Filch.

"You'd better flee, Iliana, before Filch catches you. He's got a terrible head cold."

"I-"

But whatever she'd been about to say got cut off as Filch was there, wheezing and furious.

"Filth! Mess and muck everywhere! I've had enough of it, I tell you! Follow me, Potter!"

"I've been Vanishing the mud!" she protested.

"Bah," Filch snorted. "Like you miserable students ever get it all. No, I'll have to clean up the rest. I can see great spots you've missed even from this distance. Well I'm not doing it, not this time! To my office with you, girlie. Going to make an example of you!"

Gloomy now, Iliana followed the caretaker to his office with a glum backward glance at Nick.

The office, which none of the collective had been in before, matched Filch to a T. The place dingy and lightless and gave off an air of neglectful malice, like a very small and dingy dungeon. It was even equipped like a dungeon, with instruments of bondage and torture.

 _ **Filch is into some kinky shit,**_ Al thought. _**Not that I'm judging.**_

 _Oh thank you SO MUCH, Al, for that horrible image that is now burned into my brain. As if we didn't have enough nightmares._

 _ **He and Mrs. Pince probably-**_

 _DO NOT FINISH THAT SENTENCE, AL!_

It was a good thing, though, that Al was making her feel gross, because if she'd been laughing with him, she doubted Filch would appreciate it. But as it was, her expression befitted the situation to his pleasure.

"Dung," he muttered furiously, "great sizzling dragon bogies! Frog brains! Rat intestines... I've had enough of it! Make an example of you. Where's the form? Yes."

He retrieved a large roll of parchment from his desk drawer and stretched it out in front of him, dipping his long black quill into the ink pot.

"Name, Iliana Potter. Crime... befouling the castle."

"Listen, I was Vanishing the mud specifically out of consideration for you. I know your job is hard, so I was-"

"Ha! Like you little monsters ever care about anything but getting caught. Hang you by your thumbs in the dungeon if I could, put the proper fear of trouble into you, I would."

 _ **Forget it, he's determined to be difficult,**_ Al thought at her.

"Punishment," Filch said, thinking.

As Filch lowered his quill, there was a massive BANG above them, making his oil lamp rattle.

"PEEVES!" Filch roared, completely forgetting Iliana as he and Mrs. Norris stormed toward the door. "I'll have you out this time, Peeves!"

 _ **Well that was close. Let's scram while we can.**_

 _No, he'll just track us down and be even angrier._

 _ **I'm sure he'll forget all about our tiny bit of mud with whatever Peeves has done.**_

 _We still have mud on us. We'll spread more if we go, and we don't have the time to Vanish it this time._

 _ **Good point. Fine, whatever.**_

Iliana sat down on the moth-eaten chair by the desk. As she did, she noticed something on his desk, a large, glossy, purple envelope with silver lettering on the front. With a quick glance at the door to check that Filch wasn't on his way back, Iliana picked up the envelope and read:

 **KWIKSPELL**

 **A Correspondence Course in Beginners' Magic**

 _ **Well that's that confirmed. He's a wizard-born Muggle, then. Poor man. Like I've said, working here must be Hell for him.**_

One line of the letter especially caught Al's attention: 'My wife used to sneer at my feeble charms, but one month into your fabulous Kwikspell course and I succeeded in turning her into a yak!'

 _ **Sounds more like an ad for a potion to grow your dick longer than a magic correspondence course.**_

 _AL! Put that back!_

But Al had grabbed control of the right arm and continued reading through the Kwikspell letter.

 _ **I wonder if this stuff actually works?**_

 _I doubt it,_ Harry replied. _From what I've seen, either you're magic or you're not. I suppose a Muggle could learn Potions, as it's the ingredients that are magical, and maybe there are other classes a Muggle could do well at, but anything requiring a wand would be pointless. Does Filch even have a wand? If not, what's the point of trying this Kwikspell thing?_

 _ **Maybe he bought one anyway?**_

They didn't get to discuss it any more than that, though, because they heard Filch returning. Hurriedly, they returned the Kwikspell letter to its envelope, though they noticed too late they'd done it poorly.

"That vanishing cabinet was extremely valuable!" Filch said triumphantly. "We'll have Peeves out this time, my sweet!"

Filch froze as he spotted the disturbed letter, eying Iliana with a face that was rapidly changing from maggot-belly white to brick red.

"Have you... did you read...?"

"Sorrry, Mr. Filch. Al read your letter. I tried to stop him, but-"

 _ **Liar,**_ Al thought with a chuckle.

"That's my private... not that it's mine... for a friend... be that as it may..."

"We already knew you're a wizard-born Muggle. We've mentioned it to you before, and like we said before, we only care insofar as you're clearly miserable at this job, and take it out on the students rather than trying to find something more suited to you. But if it's a secret, don't worry. We won't tell."

Filch clearly had a lot of conflicting emotions crossing his face. But finally he said, "Very well... but if I find you've told anyone... not that... just go, I have to write Peeves' report."

As Iliana got up and left, Al thought, _**That was almost like blackmail, that. Maybe we should've been in Slytherin after all.**_

 _We had this discussion back when the hat went on our head._

 _ **Yes, but that was before we figured out the whole multiplicity thing.**_

"Iliana! Iliana, did it work?" Sir Nicolas said, floating toward them.

"Was that you? Yeah, we didn't get into any trouble thanks to it."

"I convinced Peeves to drop that cabinet over Filch's office, since it was me who was holding you up in the corridor."

"Well you really oughtn't have done it, but we're thankful all the same."

She walked alongside the gloomy ghost in the corridors, and noticed he still had his rejection letter from the Headless Hunt in his hand.

"I wish I could do something for you about the Headless Hunt," she said.

 _ **Oh no you did not! To Hell with that shit.**_

"Well, maybe there is something you can do..."

 _ **Damn and blast, bother and busticate!**_

"What is it?" Iliana asked, rubbing her temple to try to ignore Alastair.

"This Halloween is my 500th Death Day, and I'm holding a Death Day party down in the dungeons..."

Al groaned internally, but Iliana didn't, and in the end they ended up agreeing to go to this Death Day party, and agreed also to mention to Sir Podmore how impressive they find Sir Nicolas.

Hermione found it fascinating, of course, and though Ron wasn't, they still managed to rope the two friends into coming with.

By Halloween, though, the idea was wearing on them. Al wouldn't shut up about it for long, and Hermione's reminder that Iliana had promised Nick became the only thing stopping Iliana from changing her mind.

 _ **Can we at least ask Fred and George how to get into the kitchens, and get some food before we go? You know they're not going to serve food there. Why would they? Ghosts don't eat.**_

 _Fine, okay._

So shortly after noon on Halloween, Iliana went up to the twins and explained the situation. The twins happily dragged her down to the dungeons and showed her how to tickle the pear on a still life of a bowl of fruit. Once inside, they were practically stampeded by helpful house elves offering them food. Before long, they had plenty of food to take up to Ron and Hermione to eat before the party.

"Good thinking, mate. Al is right, ghosts won't eat food, they're dead."

So with full stomachs, Iliana and her two friends went down into the dungeons to where Nick had said the party was, Iliana only pausing to leave Aqua behind on a magically-warmed rock, since the snake didn't like the dungeons.

Upon arriving, their senses were immediately assaulted by something that was clearly intended to be music, but sounded like fingernails on chalkboards. The room was also cold and lit with black candles that released a blue light, the only other light being the pearly ghosts themselves, of which there were scores. The few windows in the room covered with black velvet drapes.

"This is like a bad stereotype," Al broke through Iliana's control to say with her voice. "I feel like they should sue themselves for defamation of character or something. If this scene showed up in a book, I'd think the author was having me on."

"Hey Al," Ron said casually.

"Is my tone really _that_ obvious, even with Iliana's voice?"

"Yes, it is."

"I wish I'd thought to bring a cloak," Hermione complained, shivering a little in the cold.

"Yeah, good point. Ghosts feel cold when you walk through them, it makes sense that a place with this many ghosts would be like an icebox. Especially since we're underground."

They were welcomed warmly by Sir Nicolas, who led them around, giving them a tour. The horrible music was being produced by 30 musical saws.

"Ever so cheerful, this lot," Al continued, still via Iliana. "But I guess a deathday would be a bit like attending your own funeral."

"Oh no, turn back! I don't want to talk to Moaning Myrtle," Hermione said.

"Who?" Ron asked.

"She haunts one of the toilets in a girl's bathroom on the first floor," Hermione explained before Iliana could.

"She haunts a toilet?"

"Yeah, it is a bit odd. Ghosts can go wherever they like, I don't know why she hangs around there," Iliana said. "But she's absolutely miserable all the time, so she must get some kind of comfort from being in there."

But to their chagrin, Peeves had heard them. He came over, and after offering them moldy peanuts, said, "Heard you talking about poor Myrtle, I did. Rude you was about poor Myrtle. OY, MYRTLE!"

"What is it?" Myrtle asked sulkily.

"Miss Granger was just talking about you," Peeves said.

"Just saying how nice you look tonight."

"You're making fun of me," she replied, her eyes beginning to well up with tears.

"No, honestly, didn't I just say how nice she's looking?" Hermione said, nudging Ron and Iliana to help her out. Ron complied, but Iliana decided to remain quiet.

"Don't lie to me," Myrtle gasped, crying in great rivulets now. "Do you think I don't know that people make fun of me behind my back? That they call me Fat Myrtle, Ugly Myrtle, Miserable, moping, moaning Myrtle."

"To be honest, Myrtle, I don't think most people think about you that much, and even if they did, why should you care what they think? And you, Peeves, should be nicer to people. You're not funny when you poke fun of people."

"Oooh, ickle second year thinks she's so high and mighty, does you? Shift the blame to old Peevesey, then, don't admit you were talking about Myrtle. But I heard you saying she could haunt any place, so why a toilet?"

Myrtle burst into tears at this and flew away, Peeves chasing after her, pelting her with peanuts.

"I appreciate you're a kind person, Iliana, but it's wasted on Myrtle. She's determined to be miserable."

After that, the Headless Hunt showed up, interrupting Nick's speech. Iliana tried helping out with Podmore, but the headless ghost wasn't impressed. The Hunt left Nick in a bad mood after that. Between Nick's bad mood, the cold, and the stench from the rotting food, the three of them decided to leave early, and head to the feast, even though they'd eaten already, in case there were puddings left.

It was on their way there that it happened. That chilling voice again, like ice down Iliana's spine.

 _'Rip, tear, KILL!'_

Their terror pushed Tier to the fore, and Iliana glowed but did not outwardly change, though Ron and Hermione knew it was Tier by his behavior, for he'd gone still as stone, head cocked to listen, then sniffed the air.

"Tier?" Ron asked tentatively. But of course, Tier didn't answer; couldn't answer.

Instead, Tier's head jerked as he heard the dangerous voice again. _'So hungry... for so long... kill... time to kill...'_

The voice was growing fainter, moving away. Tier huffed air out of his nose, not daring to growl, and chased the voice so fast that the boy and the girl struggled to follow him.

"Tier, where are we-"

Tier hissed at Ron like an angry cat, then turned back to hunt for the voice again. He sniffed the air, and smelled that dry, musty scent again. It bugged him, like the scent was familiar, but he couldn't place it.

Tier growled. He considered the boy and the girl, wondering if it was safe to leave them behind, but thought better of it. But the looks on their faces begged some kind of explanation.

Tier screwed up his face in concentration. It took a Herculean effort to figure out how to do it, but after almost a minute of trying, he managed to croak out words.

"Danger," he said in a rough voice. "Scary voice. Dangerous."

Hermione blinked.

"You can talk?" she said in awe.

"Whadda ya mean, 'dangerous'?"

Tier chuffed in an irritated fashion and ignored them both, returning to investigating the voice and sniffing for the dry, musty scent. Words were too much work for him to try to explain. The others could do that later.

There was... another scent there, too. It was human, but it was not the boy or the girl, and it was too fresh to be any of the students in the Great Hall. He did not recognize the scent, though something about it was familiar.

 _'I smell blood... I smell BLOOD!'_

The hair on Iliana's neck prickled up as Tier growled threateningly at this latest from the voice. He ran around the corner, the boy and girl behind him, hearing himself shouting "It kill! Voice wants kill!"

But the passage was deserted. Both the unidentified scents vanished, and he heard no more trace of the voice. But now there was a new scent, the smell of blood. But it wasn't human. Some sort of bird? And it was arranged in writing. Tier knew he was out of his depth now. They glowed again, and for some reason transformed into Harry.

"Harry, what was that all about?" asked Ron. "Tier said he heard some kind of voice, but we didn't hear anything."

Hermione gasped and pointed.

"Look!"

They, too, had spotted the writing in blood on the wall. In huge letters, it said, "THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE."

"Blood!" Hermione gasped.

"Don't worry, it's not human blood," Harry said.

"How do you-"

"Tier could smell it. It's from some kind of bird."

"What's that hanging underneath it?" Ron asked shakily.

It was Mrs. Norris, Filch's cat. She hung from a torch bracket by her tail, and she was petrified, still as stone but otherwise looking like she could start moving again at any moment. And there was water all over the floor.

"Let's get out of here," Ron said. "We don't want to be found here."

But that ship had sailed already. A rumble of something like distant thunder was all the warning they got before every other student in the castle came up from the Great Hall. Everyone stared at it in silence for many heartbeats, before the silence was broken by a familiar sneering voice.

"Enemies of the heir beware? You'll be next, mudbloods!"

 _ **Malfoy,**_ Al thought, resisting the urge to take a page out of Tier's book and attack him like an animal.

But he wouldn't have had a chance to anyway, because just then Filch came through and saw his cat petrified. He immediately rounded on Harry.

"You! You little freaks murdered my cat! You've killed her! I'll-"

"Argus!"

It was Dumbledore. He and several other teachers had come to see what the commotion was. He quickly took in the sight, then wordlessly took Mrs. Norris down off the bracket. He then adjourned the teachers, Filch, Harry, Ron, and Hermione to Lockhart's office, because the fool had offered the space.

Lockhart, of course, ran off his mouth about what he thought killed her and how he could have saved her, which served nothing but to make Filch bawl like a small child, and make the Potter collective feel even sorrier for the man than they did already.

"Mrs. Norris is not dead, Argus," Dumbledore finally announced to the grieving caretaker.

"Not dead? But why's she all stiff and frozen?"

"She has been petrified. But how, I cannot say."

"Ask _THEM!_ " he shouted, pointing at Harry. "Those little freaks-"

"You will refrain using that offensive word, Argus. No second year could have done this, not even one with innate talents such as the Potters have. This is dark magic of the most advanced-"

"They did it! They did it! They know I'm a... a Squib!"

Al felt a stab of irritation so strong they transformed into his taller form. "I don't know what that word means."

"Liar! You saw my Kwikspell letter!"

Al growled. "How many damn times do I have to tell you I don't give a rat's arse if you can do magic or not, my only issue with you is that you're clearly miserable here at Hogwarts. I don't hate you, I feel sorry for you. And I don't know what this has to do with that writing anyway."

"The writing," Dumbledore explained, "Refers to a secret chamber that Salazar Slytherin supposedly made in the school. The heir it references is Slytherin's heir."

"Oh. Well that explains some things."

"If I might speak, headmaster?" Snape said. Al glowered at Snape, whose face briefly became a rictus of loathing before relaxing again. The man turned his gaze away from Al, saying in a voice of forced calm, "Potter may have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the circumstances are suspicious. Why were these three here, and not in the Great Hall and the feast?"

"I got roped into going to Sir Nicolas's deathday party, so that's where we were. Hundreds of ghosts saw us, including Nick."

"But why not join the feast afterward? I doubt ghosts serve food humans can eat."

"Oh gee," Al said in a voice dripping with sarcasm. "Why didn't I think of that? Oh wait, I did. We ate before going, of course. Hermione and Ron can confirm, as can all the house elves and the Weasley Twins."

Snape looked even angrier at this, like he was trying to trap them and was irritated that he was failing.

"Then why were you up in that corridor? There are myriad other paths to the Griffindor tower," Snape snapped at them.

"We _were_ actually going back to the feast at first, then I heard something weird. I don't remember it very well, because Tier took over the moment we heard it and went looking for it, sniffing around. His nose is what led us to that corridor. He smelled the blood. Which is from some sort of bird, by the way, though Tier didn't know what kind."

Dumbledore gave him a searching look. Al felt like he was being x-rayed. Almost as soon as it started, the man was twinkling at them again.

"Innocent until proven guilty, Severus."

Snape looked furious; his hands twitched like he wanted to strangle Al. Filch looked equally furious, and began demanding punishment for his cat being petrified.

"I have already said this is far beyond the capability of a second year student, even one as remarkable as the Potters. Furthermore, we will be able to cure her. Professor Sprout is growing a healthy crop of mandrakes, which will be used to make a potion to restore her to full health."

Lockhart said some more stupid things, which Snape countered, but then Dumbledore was letting them go. They took off quickly as they dared, and ducked into an unused classroom to talk.

"Tier heard a voice. It was a terrifying voice, like ice down the spine. We've heard it before, it was the same one we heard in Lockhart's office during that detention. It was talking about killing, and blood, and being hungry, this time. It was mostly that voice Tier was following, not the scent of the blood; that came after. Should I have told Dumbledore about that?"

Ron looked grave. "Not in front of Snape and the others, no. Even in the wizarding world, it's not a good sign to hear voices nobody else can. Well, except for you lot communicating with one another, but that's not the same."

"You do believe us, though?"

"Yes. It's weird, but yes."

Al nodded.

"What's a Squib? They didn't explain that. But given the context, the Kwikspell letter, I'm guessing it means a wizard-born Muggle?"

Ron nodded. "Yeah, that's a good way of putting it, cuz they are like the opposite of a Muggle-born witch or wizard."

"Yeah. I guess my theory was right. I've been saying that for a long time."

"It explains a lot about Filch. He's bitter."

A clock chimed somewhere, and they took that as their cue to head to bed.

The next few days, nobody could talk about anything but the message about the Chamber of Secrets. Filch was more horrible than usual, finding all kinds of flimsy excuses to lash out at students, whenever he wasn't trying fruitlessly to clean the bloody message off the wall or standing guard over the area. Then Ron, ever the master of tact, tried to comfort an upset Ginny and ended up making things worse. Al didn't even bother to comment at this, it wasn't worth trying to grab control again over. (He had retreated within before going to bed that fateful night, leaving Harry in his place.)

Another effect was Hermione going to the library at all hours, trying to get ahold of "Hogwarts, A History," because she wanted to research the Chamber of Secrets, but she'd left her own copy at home due to all of Lockhart's paperweights. (That was his books' only real use, seeing as parchment sucked as toilet paper, and Hermione would have dropped dead from shock if Al even _suggested_ desecrating any book for any reason.) Too bad for her, all copies of the book were checked out.

In fact, Al was seething in frustrated rage at the essay he was trying to write, on one of the few days he was fully Out, as he kept getting splotches of ink all over it. He tossed the essay across the room in a fury.

"Haven't wizards heard about PAPER, yet?" he roared. "It's the NINETEEN-NINETIES, for Chrissake, why the bloody Hell are we still writing on dead animal skins and using shitty quill pens when dead trees and ballpoint pens are so much more _efficient_? Fuck this, I'm using paper and ballpoint pen! If the teachers don't like it, then bully for them."

"But Al, our essays are measured in inches," Hermione reminded him.

"Fine, then I'll tape the pages together. But I'm not using this old-fashioned bullshit again, I'm just not."

"Iliana has no problem with parchment and quill."

"Yeah, and she can also fly like a dream and catch tiny winged balls out of the air, and I can't. So pardon me if I don't care what she can do that I can't."

"Al? What's really bothering you."

Al was digging around through his bag for a pen, and was about to go up to his trunk, when Hermione's question got through to him.

"Gee I don't know," Al said sarcastically, "it certainly couldn't be because some bloody berk is going around daubing threatening messages on the walls of a school in bird's blood, because that would just be silly!"

"Just drop it, Hermione," Ron said. "Al is... it's just how he is."

"No it's not. He's usually content to hang back and watch the-"

"I mean when he's Out."

Al snorted loud enough to be heard around the room, but said nothing. Instead, he went up to check his trunk. Only when he came back with a black BIC pen and a college-ruled notebook did he speak.

"Also, you know, there's Snape, who hates all of us, but seems to have an extra special place in the black hole in his chest for me in particular. Specifically, the order of his hatred seems to be me at the top of his hit list, followed by Harry, then Iliana. No idea what he thinks of Zoey or Tier, though. So of course he insinuates that we must have been up to no good when we found the message."

"At least he doesn't seem to think you did it."

Al started copying what he could see of his essay onto the paper.

"Yeah, but did you see his rictus of hatred when he saw Harry change to me? As though he were a Jew and I turned into Hitler right in front of him."

"Who's Hitler?"

"He was a sort of Muggle Voldemort," Al said without thinking. Ron shouted about using the name, but Al ignored him and continued. "He gained control of Germany in the, what? The 40's, I think? Spread his empire across Europe and he ordered millions of people killed; mostly Jews, but also homosexuals, gypsies, and political prisoners, among others."

" _Millions?"_

Al sighed. "Wizard education must be shit. Yes, millions of people."

Ron gaped at him like a fish for several minutes.

"Millions of people... it's too much to really think about, mate. There might be millions of wizards and witches worldwide. If someone in our world killed millions of wizards and witches, there'd be almost nobody _left_. And yet there's so many Muggles that they just... recovered from that?"

"Pretty much. Though it was a lot bigger number at the time, in terms of scale. There's billions more Muggles in the world these days than there were in the 40's."

Ron was stunned speechless by this. Which was just as well for Al, he had an essay to finish.

Later that week, in History of Magic, Hermione actually got the ghost teacher's attention and managed to also get him to tell them all the tale of the Chamber of Secrets. Harry listened raptly, as did the others in his collective.

"I always knew Slytherin must've been a twisted old loony," Ron later said.

Al grabbed control of Harry's body and sighed.

"Is that the most you could get from that story? Honestly..."

"What are you on about?"

"This school was founded at a time when witches and wizards were being hunted and killed because of Muggle fear of magic. Slytherin had the right idea back then to be wary of Muggle-borns. But now modern racists cling to his outdated point of view, when everything has changed. Muggles don't believe in magic anymore, and when they do run across it, there's usually wizards right behind them to modify their memories. Wizards are in control, but they act like Muggles are going to gang up on wizardkind at any moment."

"Well, he had a horrible monster in a secret chamber! A monster only he could control."

"A terrible monster under his control, in a room only he and his heirs could get to. Sounds like a panic room to me."

"A panic room?"

"A place to go when there's a threat, to be safe. He was afraid of Muggles attacking the castle, because that's what they were doing at the time. So he builds a secret chamber to hide people in if that happens, and a secret weapon, a terrible monster, to fight the invading armies and make the school safe again. But of course people forget historical context. I blame Binns for killing people's interest in history."

"How do you know so much about history?"

"Well aside from remembering things I've heard, I read. I've read our History of Magic book cover to cover, it's fascinating. That class could be amazing if Binns wasn't teaching it. You know, I might even get some more history books the next time I go to Flourish and Blotts."

"I never knew you were a bookworm, Al."

"We don't read as much as Hermione, but yeah, we like reading. I... we used to go to the library to read. We didn't dare get a library card or check anything out, in case our uncle destroyed them, but anything we could read before they closed we'd suck up like a sponge. It was our only escape. Hey, what's this?"

They'd wandered to the scene of the crime, in their discussion. Luckily, Filch wasn't there to snipe at them.

"Heck, let's poke around," Al said.

And poke around they did. It was Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, and had an Out of Order sign. The water was all cleaned up, but there were scorch marks in places, which was odd. And there were spiders moving so fast they looked like they were running away from something, all going in the same direction. Al looked at Ron, who was terrified of the spiders, and filed that information away, barely listening to Ron and Hermione talking about it.

Once they ran out of stuff outside to look at, they went in, over Ron's objections. Al took in the place with his eyes; it certainly matched Myrtle's usual mood, being just as gloomy as she was, and old looking.

Then, naturally, Myrtle showed up.

"This is a girl's bathroom," Myrtle said, eyeing Ron and Al. "They're not girls."

"Not at the moment, anyway," Al said. "But for me, that could change at any moment."

"What are you lot doing here, anyway?"

"Snooping," Al said before Hermione could speak. "A cat was attacked just outside, and a message written in blood, back on Halloween. Did you see anything that night?"

"No," Myrtle pouted. "I was too busy crying because of Peeves being mean to me, to see anything. I came in here to kill myself, only then I remembered I'm... I'm..."

"Already dead?" Ron asked.

"Way to go, jackass!" Al shouted as Myrtle began wailing again. She jumped into a toilet and only by dodging quickly did Al avoid getting splashed with toilet water. He stormed out, muttering under his breath, and the other two followed.

"RON!"

It was Percy Weasley. He was staring in shock at the three of them coming out of a girl's loo.

"That's a girl's bathoom! What were you-"

"He had to pee, and it was an emergency. Anyway, we were with him and nobody else was in there, so what's it to you?"

"You're not supposed to be in there either, Al," Percy commented.

"Okay fine, we were snooping. Looking for clues."

This did not go over well.

"Don't you care what this looks like?"

"Not particularly, no. Dumbledore knows it wasn't any of us, and there isn't a measurement small enough to measure how much I care about the opinions of any of the students."

"Yeah, we didn't lay a finger on that cat," Ron snapped.

"That's what I told Ginny, but she's still very upset over it. All the first years are thoroughly overexcited by this business."

Al rolled his eyes. "Yeah, it's just an unknown horrifying monster with the ability to petrify people running loose in a school, can't see what there is to get excited about there."

"You don't care about Ginny! You're just worried she'll ruin your chance of being Head Boy," Ron accused.

Percy took offense at this, said "Ten points from Griffindor. Let that be a lesson not to play detective. Don't do it again or I'll write mum!"

As he stormed off, Al snorted, then chuckled.

"What's so funny?"

"He forgot only teachers can dock points, the prat."

Despite knowing Percy couldn't dock points, Ron was still in a foul mood as they worked on schoolwork later. His increasingly glitchy wand set the parchment on fire, though that may have been his anger. It was enough of a gray area that Al didn't comment.

They didn't get far in their work when Hermione closed her book.

"Who could it be, though? Who'd want to scare the Muggle-borns and Squibs?"

"You mean aside from Moldywart?" Al asked.

"Gee, who do we know who thinks Muggle-borns are scum?" Ron said, ignoring Al.

"Are you talking about Malfoy?" Hermione asked.

Al snorted.

"Malfoy doesn't have the brains. He and his two pet gorillas are only in Slytherin because they wouldn't want to be anywhere else."

"Well maybe he's got help. Maybe his father told him how to get into the Chamber."

"You're basing your argument entirely on circumstantial evidence. And even that's being generous."

"What about what he said when we all found the message. 'You'll be next, Mudbloods.'"

"Malfoy is the human equivalent of a vulture, all apologies to vultures for the insult; he's an opportunistic scavenger, couldn't think of a clever scheme if God Itself came up and stuck one in his spoiled blond head. He's got just enough wit to take advantage of situations he finds, and occasionally tries to goad people into getting themselves in trouble, but otherwise he's not much brighter than Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Crabbe and Goyle, I mean," he said, at Ron's confused look.

"Look, I'm telling you it's Malfoy. He's got the hatred, he's from an old family who have been in Slytherin for loads of generations, they've probably been handing the key down all these centuries..."

Al rubbed his head, tuning out the rest of Ron's anti-Malfoy rant. How could he explain that he'd looked Malfoy in the eye and seen the little puffed up popinjay wasn't capable of this? That Malfoy was just a coward who liked to boast and looked up to his father and all the man stood for, but ultimately didn't believe those things enough to actually act on them, and that his only evidence for this was one of those varied abilities like Parseltongue that he didn't know how it would be received in the wizarding world? Seeing that Lockhart was a lying fraud was one thing, but this was very complex, and Al didn't have the energy to explain it.

"Okay, fine, it might be Malfoy. But unless you have some way of proving it, all you have is a suspicion."

"I might have a way," Hermione said. "Of course, it's difficult and dangerous, illegal, and breaks a whole mess of school rules, I expect-"

"Care filling us in sometime in the next month?" Ron snapped.

"Well, we'll need to get into the Slytherin common room and ask Malfoy questions without him realizing it's us."

Al gave her an annoyed look.

"Okay, we don't have enough control of our powers to just take any form at all, and we can't pass it on to anyone else, so if that's what you were thinking-"

"No, I mean we'll need to brew some Polyjuice Potion."

"And what, pray tell, is that?"

"It's a potion to transform us into other people. We become three Slytherins, someone Malfoy trusts, and talk the secret out of him."

"I don't know, Hermione. I don't know how this potion would react with our transformation magic. It could be harmless, but it might interact-"

"You're human, and the potion is for human transformations. Unless you're radically different from other humans on a genetic level, like so different you couldn't have kids, I doubt you'll react with it. You've use other potions before without problems, right?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Well it should be fine, then."

"Okay, but I reserve the right to hex you if you're wrong."

For another hour, they discussed the particulars of the potion. Among other things, they would have to fetch the book from the Restricted Section.

"We'll need a teacher's signature to get in there," Hermione noted.

"Who is thick enough to sign it without asking us what we want it for?"

Al was idly picking at a spot on his chair when he felt both their eyes on him. He looked up, and saw they were giving him a significant look.

"Oh fucking Hell no," he said, when he got it. "I'm not going near Lockhart willingly. Neither is Iliana or Harry."

"So have Zoey do it. She handled him like a dream."

"Al," Hermione said, her hand on his. "Please? We need to find out who it is."

Al glared and gritted his teeth. His eyes went unfocused as the collective had a quick but heated argument internally. When his eyes focused again, he was glaring in a manner similar to Snape.

"We'll do it," he said. "Or rather, Harry will. I'll be hiding as deeply inside as I can."

"Oh, thank you, Alastair!"

"Yeah yeah, whatever. I'll get you back for this somehow, though."

When they went to bed later, Al grumbled, "How the hell do I always get roped into shit I detest?"

End note 1: Google gave me 32 galleons ($150 USD) for the price of Harry's Nimbus 2000, but I have no idea how they came up with that number. Though with something as high quality, long lasting, and important as a wand being only the equivalent of $35, I guess that makes sense. So I made the 2001 be 35 galleons.

End note 2: Yes I know the gypsies are properly called the Roma, but since that's not exactly common knowledge even now, let alone then, I'm assuming Al doesn't know that yet.


	9. Rogue Bludgers and Other Dangers

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 9"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Nine: Rogue Bludgers and Other Dangers

Note: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

After much debate, the collective finally decided that Zoey would, indeed, be getting the Lockhart signature. Wanting to get a head start on it, they had Zoey take over and transform before DADA class. This was safe, as Lockhart didn't bring live creatures into class any more after that first debacle with the pixies. Instead he read passages from the books that the collective, Ron, and a few other boys were now pretty sure were a pack of lies, as the darkest creature Lockhart seemed capable of handling was a bowtruckle, and even that was questionable.

Zoey volunteered to help play the part of a werewolf to get him in a good mood, lots of people laughing at her cute "Rawr!" The gambit seemed to pay off, though as Zoey put the permission slip underneath his nose, he seemed hardly to notice what he was signing, with his big peacock-feather quill.

"Well that was super-de-duper easy," Zoey said, skipping alongside Ron and Hermione. "I think he'll sign anything you give him."

Ms. Pince was a little harder to convince. She took many minutes trying to find a forgery, but finding none she finally relented and got the book for them, a book called Moste Potente Potions. She seemed very reluctant to let them have it, even after accepting Lockhart's signature, but get it they did.

They adjourned to Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, since it was abandoned, and Filch had finally gone back to his usual rounds, giving the horrible place his cat had been attacked a wide berth now. Hermione got out the book and found the pages about the Polyjuice Potion.

 _ **I hope those illustrations are artist's creative license and not accurate depictions of the transformation,**_ Al said internally. _**Because those look very painful.**_

The potion itself was fiddly, very difficult to make, and would take an entire month to brew. And two of the ingredients were hard to come by: powdered horn of a bicorn, and shredded skin of a boomslang. Ron pointed out that they'd have to steal the ingredients.

Zoey became Al before their eyes, midway through the conversation.

"I don't want to piss off Snape. He'll know we broke in, I just know it. Can't I just owl-order them?"

"First of all, Al," Hermione started, "we've no idea how long it would take the owl order to come in, we don't know if the apothecary in Diagon Alley carries them, and it's a highly restricted potion, illegal to brew without permission from the Ministry. If you owl-ordered two of the major ingredients for it, especially since we don't know what else these ingredients are used together for, that would look very suspic-"

"Yeah yeah, okay, I get it. We'll have to risk death and dismemberment from Snape to get these ingredients."

"Good. Because we need to get this started as soon as we can."

Ron turned to Al. "It'll be a lot less hassle if Iliana can just knock Malfoy off his broom tomorrow."

Iliana felt nervous the next morning, but in a good way. Slytherin had tried wrong-footing them, and she'd turned it around in their favor, leveled the playing field. No cheating from the brooms, anyway; they'd either have to play fairly (HA!) or else cheat some other way. And she was determined not to give them too much opportunity to cheat; she would be finding the snitch as soon as she could.

It didn't help her nerves, though, when she received an owl from Healer Young about her upcoming mind healing session with him. She'd been going to these sessions once every fortnight upon getting to school, but a lot had happened since the last one. No matter how comfortable Healer Young made her feel, there was always the background discomfort of knowing that he would eventually want to go into territory that was still raw and wounded in her mind, and most of the sessions' hours were a tug of war between trying to be comfortable with Healer Young and trying to avoid thinking about those things they were skirting around for now. Because every time she thought too much about... those things... she would have a freakout and end up going into hiding, letting someone else come to the front instead. And she knew running away wasn't going to help anything.

So she shoved the letter away for now, and concentrated on her breakfast, which suddenly tasted like shag carpeting and rubber.

Still struggling with her thoughts and emotions, she finally went down to the pitch and got changed into her Quidditch robes. She barely listened to Wood's pre-game pep talk, either. It wasn't until she was on her broom and in the air that the wonderful sensation of flying filled their shared brain with joy and freedom, that she was able to cast away those thoughts and concentrate on the game.

Madam Hooch counted down, then blew the whistle that started the game. Iliana flew around the rest of the players, sometimes above and sometimes below, looking for that elusive golden ball.

"Alright there, scarhead?" Malfoy taunted as he flew around in his Nimbus 2001. Iliana suspected the fact that she was still using her old Nimbus 2000 was what was giving him this lesser amount of gloating that he was clutching so tightly to. Hers was the only older broom in the whole school's fleet, because she and Harry both loved this broom too much to replace it needlessly.

She didn't have time to say any of this, though, as she barely had time to even think it, due to one of the heavy black Bludgers pelting straight for them. Speeding off in reaction, she felt it whip her hair as it went past.

"Close one, Illiana!" George said, going after the ball to hit it at Slytherin. It flew toward Adrian Pucey at first, then changed direction midair and came for Iliana again.

Not stopping to think about it, she bolted off fast as she could to get away, scared now. That wasn't normal; Bludgers weren't supposed to target any specific player.

For many minutes, Iliana kept trying to get away from the Bludger, making hairpin turns the heavier ball couldn't manage, while Fred and George tried to keep it away from her. And as if that wasn't bad enough, it was raining.

Finally, someone called a time-out. Thankfully, the Bludger didn't pursue her to the ground.

"What's going on?" Wood started. "We're ahead by twenty points, but Slytherin is getting nastier, I don't know how long we can stay ahead. But we'd be doing a lot better if Angelina had been able to score; twice she missed it because of a Bludger. Where have you two been?" he asked the twins.

"We've been concentrating on keeping Iliana alive," George said angrily. "The other Bludger keeps targeting her, turning in midair. It's been fixed! The Slytherins must figure she had something to do with the school's new brooms," he said, giving her a knowing look that also looked very concerned.

"But the Bludgers have been locked up in Madam Hooch's office since our last practice, and they were alright then," Wood pointed out.

"Listen," Iliana said. "I can't concentrate on finding the snitch with you two buzzing around me. I appreciate you keeping me safe, but I can handle the Bludger."

In the ensuing argument, one of the twins accused Wood of having told Iliana to catch the snitch or die trying, which Iliana couldn't remember him saying. Then again, she hadn't been listening then, either.

"No, really; I didn't give in when Malfoy cheated his way onto the Slytherin team, I'm not about to let them win this latest volley. Let me handle the rogue Bludger, Oliver. If nothing else, maybe Zoey can turn it into a pillow or something."

The twins didn't seem pleased by this, but Wood agreed, and soon they were up in the air playing again.

The game became a complicated dance of zigging, zagging, and other tricks for Iliana, anything to get away from the Bludger and give herself time to look for the snitch as well. The crowd, seemingly oblivious to the danger, laughed at her antics, but she barely noticed, being too intent on surviving.

Then, as it whistled past her head once more after a stupid midair twirl to avoid it, she heard Malfoy speak.

"Training for the ballet, Potter?"

She glared at Malfoy in hatred, and as she did, she saw the snitch. It was right by the blond git's left ear, and he was too busy taunting her to notice. Stuck in a moment of indecision, she had paused just a little too –

WHAM!

Someone was screaming. It was her; the Bludger had broken her arm at the elbow. She fought down the pain and rushed Malfoy, who thought she was attacking him.

"What the-"

Iliana took her remaining hand off the broom and made a wild grab for the snitch, grabbing it. She bolted for the ground, trying to get away from the Bludger. She hit the mud with a splat, and passed out.

She came around a bit later, rain in her face, and saw a lot of glittering teeth.

"No, not you!"

"Doesn't know what she's saying," Lockhart said to the Griffindors pressing around them. "Not to worry, Iliana, I'm about to fix your arm."

"No. No need. Zoey will fix it. Once I get enough... energy..."

 _ZOEY! HURRY! BEFORE-_

But it was too late. Lockhart pointed his wand at her arm, said an incantation, and suddenly the pain went away. But her arm felt very weird, like rubber.

"You bloody moron!" she screamed at him, punching him in the nose with her remaining arm. He yowled, his nose bleeding, and ran from the scene.

 _ **Heh, good one. Now he**_ _ **is**_ _ **a bloody moron, literally,**_ Al thought.

Colin Creevy snapped a photo of her as she lay there, her arm like Jello.

"How many times do I have to tell you I don't like my photo taken, Colin?" she snapped irritably at him. She didn't get to find out his response, though, because he was being moved out of the way by others, who needed to help her get to the hospital wing.

Madam Pomfrey was not pleased. "You should have come to me straight away. Mending bones I can do in a trice. Regrowing them, though..."

"It's not our fault. It was that idiot, Lockhart. You will be able to regrow them, won't you?" Iliana wasn't sure Zoey could have mended the break, and was even less sure about regrowing bones.

"Yes, it can be done. But it'll be very painful. You're in for a long night, and because I'm not sure how it will affect things, you should try not to transform."

"Lovely. An overnight stay, lots of pain, and no transforming. Understood. What do I need to do?"

"Here, drink this," she said, handing Iliana a dose of something called Skele-Grow.

Iliana drank some, and had to fight the urge to spit it out or vomit, it tasted so foul. She did manage to get it all, though.

"That tastes the way Dudley's sweat socks smelled. Or worse."

Luckily, she had her friends to distract her from the pain that was starting up in her arm. Ron and Hermione talked about the catch, the Bludger, and Malfoy's face when his team captain berated him for missing the snitch right by his head. It made Iliana feel better. Naturally, it didn't last; Madam Pomfrey eventually made them leave, leaving her with nothing to distract herself but an internal conversation.

 _ **I hope that git was in a lot of pain when you broke his nose.**_

 _Me too. But did you see him in the other bed earlier? A simple spell and he was alright again. Thank goodness Madam Pomfrey kept him away from us._

 _ **I wonder if there's a way to make him feel the pain this potion is causing us?**_

 _If there is, I suspect it's illegal._

 _ **Oh?**_

 __ _Yes. A curse to cause pain would be a torture spell. I would sure hope that wasn't legal._

 _ **Point. Maybe we can just return the favor. I think I heard the spell he used.**_

 _Forget it, Al. There's no telling what that spell was intended to do, or that it would work the same way twice. Maybe Zoey can jinx his shoes together later._

The conversation tapered off a little, then. They sent each other images of Lockhart being turned into a slug, or being given feathers, or his beautiful face being hexed with terrible swelling or something, until the pain finally lessened enough that they slid into sleep.

Hours later, they awoke in the dark, their arm hurting. But what woke them instead was giant eyes staring at them. Triggered by this, Iliana tried to scream, but Dobby put his hand on her mouth and tried shushing her. She fought her way away from him, curling her knees up under her, hyperventilating.

"Dobby is sorry for waking Miss, and sorrier still for scaring Miss."

When she finally started to calm down, she asked shakily, "What are you doing here, Dobby?"

"Dobby is wanting to ask Miss the same question. Dobby warned Miss not to come to Hogwarts, why did Miss not listen?"

"Because, if you recall, the protection of my mother's blood is broken now, and Hogwarts is the safest place to be, with Dumbledore here."

Dobby flapped his ears, he shook his head so hard. "No, Miss! Miss is wrong. Hogwarts is where the danger is. Miss should be far away from here. Why did Miss not stay away when she is missing the train?"

She glowered at him. "Oh, so we were right about you being the cause of the barrier not working."

"Indeed, yes. Dobby is hiding and waiting to stop the barrier, thinking this is keeping Miss and company from danger, but later Dobby is hearing you found a way around it. Dobby is so shocked, he let his master's dinner burn. Such a flogging Dobby never had, Miss..."

 _ **I can't tell if he's being genuinely miserable or if he's manipulating us. I guess my heart reading doesn't work so well on non-humans,**_ Al said to Iliana. _**Though I am certain he's genuinely trying to keep us alive.**_

"That's horrible, Dobby. They shouldn't do that to you."

"Dobby thought his bludger would be-"

Al seized control of the body but didn't transform it. "Oh, so you're the reason that thing tried to kill me, are you?"

Missing the change in tone to Al entirely, Dobby said, "Not kill you, Miss, never kill you."

"Just maimed enough to have to go home, is that it? Did it ever occur to you that such might leave me helpless and at someone else's mercy? Even if I had no chance of winning, I'd rather die fighting than just let Voldemort kill me like shooting fish in a barrel."

Dobby shuddered at the name, of course, and looked about to speak, but paused, thinking a bit, before continuing, "Dobby is not thinking of that, Miss. And for that, Dobby is sorry. Miss is so brave, and Dobby is so sad. But Dobby is sadder if Miss is killed."

His eyes watered, and he blew his nose on the pillowcase he was wearing. Al/liana pulled a face.

"Why do you wear that disgusting thing, Dobby?"

"This, Miss? Tis a mark of a house elf's enslavement. Dobby can only be freed if his master presents him with proper clothes, Miss, which master will never do."

"Are you at least going to let me in on _why_ you want me sent home in pieces?"

"Oh, if only you knew, Miss! If only you knew!" Dobby wailed, giant tears going down his front. "If she knew what she means to us, to the lowly, the enslaved, we dregs of the magical world! Dobby remembers how it was when He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was at the height of his powers, Miss! We house-elves were treated like vermin, Miss! Of course, Dobby is still treated like that, Miss," he admitted, drying his face on the pillowcase. "But mostly, Miss, life has improved for my kind since you triumphed over He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Harry Potter survived, and the Dark Lord's power was broken, and it was a new dawn, Miss, and Harry Potter shone like a beacon of hope for those of us who thought the Dark days would never end, Miss, and still you do, even more. … And now, at Hogwarts, terrible things are to happen, are perhaps happening already, and Dobby cannot let the Potters stay here now that history is to repeat itself, now that the Chamber of Secrets is open once more-"

Dobby froze, horror-struck, and grabbed an empty water jug, beating himself about the head with it.

Iliana tried to stop him hitting himself, but Al wouldn't let go control of her arms.

 _Damn it, Al, let me stop him!_

 _ **He's responsible for breaking our arm, nearly killing us. Good intentions or not, I'm willing to let him carry on a bit.**_

This made Iliana so angry at Al that she finally got control of her body back, and rescued Dobby from his self-harming.

 _Al, he's a SLAVE and he was being magically induced to hurt himself, and you would have had me just stand there and not stop him? Are you really that cruel?_

 __Al didn't respond in words, but she could sense his shame, so she concentrated on Dobby instead.

"So this Chamber of Secrets is real, then? And you say it's been opened before? Tell me, Dobby, please. Forewarned is forearmed, and knowledge is power, after all."

Dobby struggled against her grip, pleading with her. "Ask no more, Miss, ask no more of poor Dobby! Dark deeds are planned in this place, and you must go anywhere away from here, go abroad, get away from the danger!"

"If you could offer any help on who's planning it or how, that would help us so maybe we could stop it before it got really bad. Honestly, I'm not Muggle-born, so if it's the heir of Slytherin, I should be safe."

"Dobby can't say, Miss! Dobby can't!"

"Who opened it last time?"

Dobby shook his head violently, still fighting to get out of her grip.

 _ **If we're in danger despite being wizard-born, that kind of implies the heir has a grudge against us. Which would suggest Moldywart, but Dobby already said it wasn't him.**_

 __ _No,_ Harry replied. _What he said was it didn't have anything with 'he who must not be named.'_

 _ **So we're back to 'Voldemort' being a pseudonym? But we don't know who he was before. Do we know anyone who might know his real name?**_

"Dobby, you said before it wasn't to do with He Who Must Not Be Named. Al thinks you meant that the name he now goes by is fake. Is there some way we can find out his true name?"

"Dobby can't, Miss! Miss must go far away from here!"

"We have friends here, Dobby. One of my best friends is Muggle born. We're not going anywhere. We're not leaving them to this heir of Slytherin, whoever it is. Especially not if it's Voldemort."

"The Potters risk their own lives for their friends! So noble, so valiant. But they must save themselves! The Potters must not-"

Dobby suddenly froze, his bat ears quivering. Iliana heard it, too. There were footsteps coming down the passageway outside.

"Dobby must go!" breathed the elf, terrified. There was a loud crack, and Iliana's fist was suddenly clenched on thin air. She slumped back into bed, her eyes on the dark doorway to the hospital wing as the footsteps drew nearer.

Next moment, Dumbledore was backing into the dormitory, wearing a long woolly dressing gown and a nightcap. He was carrying one end of what looked like a statue. Professor McGonagall appeared a second later, carrying its feet. Together, they heaved it onto a bed.

Iliana and the others listened as the teachers moved around and spoke in hushed tones. She fought back tears when she found out Colin was the statue, that he'd been attacked while trying to bring her food, that he had apparently forgiven her for her earlier outburst at him. She listened, and heard the hiss of steam from Colin's ruined camera; he had _not_ managed to get a photo of his attacker, then.

"Melted," said Madam Pomfrey in wonder. "What does this mean?"

"It means," Dumbledore said, "that the Chamber of Secrets has indeed been opened again."

"But Albus," Professor McGonagall asked, "surely... who?"

"The question is not who. The question is _how_."

By the sounds Iliana heard them making, none of the other adults knew what he meant. But she did.

 _ **He knows it's Voldemort,**_ Al said in their mind. _ **Does he know who Voldy was before? We should ask him.**_

Finding Dumbledore to ask him about Voldemort, however, was more difficult than just needing to. When Iliana left the hospital wing the next morning, she found she had no idea where his office was, and he didn't exactly wander the halls. In fact, aside from mealtimes, nobody in the collective had really seen Dumbledore out of his office. There'd been the Mirror of Erised, the time he'd come to the Quidditch game, the time after... after she saved the Philosopher's Stone, and then twice because of this whole Chamber business.

It wasn't like she could just ask someone either, without a good reason. She would have to explain about Dobby, which might get him into trouble, and explain how they'd worked out what he'd meant, and they weren't even sure they had the right answer despite Dumbledore's words the night before. And the last time they'd tried to talk to Dumbledore about something important, Professor McGonagall had waylaid them.

So it was that she found herself in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom instead, trying to explain to Ron and Hermione what they'd figured out, and trying not to laugh at the sight of a cauldron and a fire inside of a toilet.

"You reckon it's You-Know-Who again?" Ron asked dubiously. "I dunno, Iliana. You already took care of him last year. He can't have found a new... a new person to share a body with already, can he? We've only got one new teacher, too, and Lockhart doesn't even wear a wizard's hat most of the time, it musses his hair. He's so vain, I can't see him risking his good looks to have You-Know-Who sticking out the back of his skull."

"Yes, well, Dumbledore doesn't know how, either, as I said. I wanted to ask Dumbledore if he knew about Vol- okay fine, Moldywart's past. But I'm certain his name is fake. In fact... something about Moldywart's _nom de guerre_ sounds familiar. Like I should know its meaning or origin somehow."

"Nom de guerre?" Ron asked.

"It means 'name of war,'" Hermione explained. "You've heard of 'nom de plume' in reference to writers' pseudonyms, haven't you?"

"Yeah."

"Same thing, but for battle, for war. To make yourself sound more impressive."

Ron chuckled. "Yeah, I'll bet You-Know-Who's real name is something stupid, like Thomas Q. Throckwaddle the fourth. Bet he got teased for it all the time, and that's why he's an evil git."

Hermione shuddered. "You-Know-Who, at school. I can't even imagine."

"Yeah," Ron nodded gravely. "You-Know-Who as a kid. Hard to believe he didn't just pop out from under a rock somewhere, fully formed. But he's human, so far as we know, which means he had to have a childhood. Wonder where he went to school?"

"Well if Iliana's right, and he was the one who opened the Chamber before, it had to have been Hogwart's he went to."

"Bloody Hell. And his name could've been anything."

"If we're right," Iliana said, "this takes both of the Malfoys out of the running. We know Mr. Malfoy was one of his followers, and he's a school governor, so it can't have been him. He and Moldy are two different people."

Hermione paused her stirring and looked pensive.

"That doesn't mean," she said, "that Malfoy couldn't have sneaked something dangerous into the castle, though. We know You-Know-Who can inhabit living beings, but he doesn't have to. He could've been brought in in a box, and inhabited someone once inside."

Ron went pale all of a sudden. "What if he's... what if he's inhabiting the monster?"

The other two went pale at this as well.

In a tremulous voice, Iliana finally said, "Well... that would explain how he was controlling it."

"But how did he control it before? When he was a kid, I mean?"

Ron shrugged. "Maybe he inherited some kind of magical monster-charming flute or something from his parents."

Iliana opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly Moaning Myrtle flew in, looking like she wanted their attention.

"Sorry to interrupt you, I know you're having a lovely time boiling foul potions in _my_ bathroom and all, but the teachers are looking for Iliana, and they're starting to sound quite alarmed."

"Shite! My session with Healer Young! I forgot all about it!" Iliana jumped up and bolted out of the room, careful to not get seen by Myrtle's bathroom.

Several minutes later, she ran to the front entrance, out of breath. "Sorry, Healer Young, I forgot about our session in all the hubbub."

The older man smiled understandingly at her. "Understandable, my dear. I was just speaking with Dumbledore, and he updated me on it all. Which reminds me..." he trailed off, and used his wand to shoot something silvery out of it, something that looked a little like an animal, but they didn't get a good look at it, as it was bolting down the hall at an incredible speed, and they didn't see where it went.

"What was that?"

"Oh, just sending a message to the teachers, so they'll stop worrying about you. Anyway, the same spot as usual again, m'dear."

The spot he spoke of was an unused classroom on the first floor, that Healer Young charmed to give them privacy as they spoke. She sat down and waited for him to finish the charms. As she did, she couldn't help looking at the back of his head. She was more relieved than she could express that he looked normal. That didn't mean he was entirely out of the running, of course.

She hated these thoughts, because she trusted him. But she had trusted Quirrell, too, and... well, that hadn't worked out so well.

Iliana clenched her teeth, her whole body tensing up. There they were, already, the thoughts she didn't want to think about. The images she didn't want to see again danced on the edges of her consciousness, teasing her like malevolent monkeys. A man screaming in agony, a man falling to the ground, dead. The light in his eyes going out.

As the world went blurry with tears, she dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand. The pain helped focus her thoughts away from things she didn't want to focus on.

"What's the matter, Iliana?" Healer Young asked softly.

"Nothing," she lied as she dried her eyes out with her sleeve. "Got something in my eye."

Healer Young didn't look like he believed her, but didn't press the issue. When Iliana got her emotions under control again, she gave him a sign that she was ready. He nodded, and sat down across from her.

Talking with him this time was a lot harder than usual. He asked her questions, and she mostly just sat there, trying to figure out what – if anything – to say. Finally, she settled on talking about things to do with the Chamber.

"The Chamber of Secrets is open," she said quietly. "I suppose Dumbledore told you that."

"Yes, he did."

"So far a cat was attacked. Then last night... last night, Colin Creevy got attacked."

Sensing something in her tone, he asked, "Did you know Mr. Creevy?"

"Not well. He's starstruck by me. A bit odd, seeing as he's Muggle born, but there we are all the same. He keeps trying to get photos of me. And... did you hear about the Quidditch match?"

"A bludger broke your arm, as I understand."

"Yes. And Colin took a photo of me after Lockhart accidentally removed all the bones in my arm."

She paused, not really wanting to go on.

"Would I be correct to guess that you told young Mr. Creevy off?"

She nodded.

Healer Young waited.

"I snapped at him. Asked how many times I had to tell him I don't like my photo taken before he figured it out. That was the last thing I said to him, before... before..."

She wiped her eyes again, and sniffed, looking anywhere but at the Healer.

"And they said he was bringing grapes to the hospital wing. They said he was trying to bring them to me. So he forgave me, I guess."

"He forgave you for losing your cool in a heated moment. He sounds like a kind young man. I don't know about you, but I think it sounds like he'd want you to forgive yourself, too."

She glared at empty air, her emotions mixing weirdly; it didn't help, either, that the emotions of the others in the collective were blending in with hers and confusing her. She'd read about MPD before, or Harry had. They thought they'd known what it was like. But this... this was like some strange hybrid between MPD and being normal. The lines between them were blurry, and yet not blurry enough, given their condition. There shouldn't _be_ lines, but there were. And they all knew they didn't want that to change, confusing as it was.

And now, where she was feeling sad before, now she was feeling angry. Angrier than she'd ever felt before. An anger that scared her.

"I DON'T KNOW!" she burst out. "I DON'T KNOW WHAT HE'D WANT ME TO DO, BECAUSE HE ISN'T HERE ANYMORE! HE'S DEAD AND..."

She froze. That isn't what she'd meant to say.

"Mister Creevy isn't dead, he's petrified," Healer Young said gently. "Once he's given a Mandrake Restorative Draught, he'll be fine again. But you weren't talking about Mr. Creevy, were you?"

Iliana ran for the door, and tried to escape. But the door wouldn't open. She pounded on the door, screaming at it.

"LET ME OUT! LET ME GO! I'M DANGEROUS!"

Healer Young made no move from his seat, just watched her scream and cry at the door. He watched her slump to the ground, to her knees, where what she was saying began to change.

"LET ME _IN_! LET ME BACK IN! ZOEY POTTER, I'M WARNING YOU! LET ME IN _NOW_!"

But there was no glow of transformation. There was only more screaming, more frustration, and more tears.

Finally, Healer Young got up and walked over to her. He squatted down to get closer to where she lay, in the fetal position, crying.

"You can't run from your emotions, Iliana. And it sounds like Zoey understands this. She's making you face them, come to terms with them, because bottling up your feelings makes them get worse; it makes them get stronger, the way bottled grape juice becomes wine."

The rest of the session consisted of Iliana crying, crying until she ran out of tears, and just lay there in a quiet torpor that belied the chaos in her brain. She didn't even have the others, anymore; they'd scurried off to some dark corner of their shared mind to wait out the storm. Knowing they'd be back helped, a little, but she felt more alone now than ever before.

It took her two more hours to calm down enough to shakily pull herself up to her feet. Healer Young said something to her about progress and their next session, but she couldn't hear it very well past the rushing sound in her ears. Just standing on her own without holding onto something made her feel dizzy and way too tall. But somehow, she made it to the Great Hall and sat down to lunch.

People tried talking to her, but she didn't respond. She looked so distraught, her eyes still puffy from crying, that they didn't press the issue. They just let her stare at her soup, taking occasional half-hearted bites that more often than not ended up back in the bowl, her hands shook so much.

It didn't take long for news of Colin being petrified to spread. And Iliana was not the only one distraught by the news; Ginny Weasley, too, looked just as upset as Iliana, who was still being forced to stay Out by the others. She and Ginny were both doing very good impressions of Moaning Myrtle, an impression that Iliana didn't come out of at all until she caught Fred and George – covered in boils and hair – jumping out at Ginny from behind a statue in an ill-advised attempt to cheer her up. Iliana ended up shouting so loudly at them in her rage that Filch came trumping along to find out what the matter was, and she stormed off before he could give her a detention.

Percy Weasley also yelled at the twins for this, and threatened to write home to their mother and tell her that Ginny was having nightmares. Iliana didn't blame her; she was having her own nightmares. This in itself was nothing new, but now Colin was in them, not just Quirrell. She even had one dream where Colin was sticking out the back of Quirrell's head, shouting about how it was her fault he was dead, and that he was going to get his revenge from beyond the grave. After that one, Iliana didn't sleep at all for the next several nights.

Even Neville was worried; though a pureblood, he was almost a squib, and the heir didn't seem to like squibs any better than they liked Muggles and Muggle-borns.

In the second week of December, McGonagall collected the names of the people staying at Hogwarts. Iliana was staying, of course, as she really didn't have anywhere else to go. Ron and Hermione signed the list, too, but the three of them were some of the few to do so, understandably.

Because of the possibility of Draco knowing something, even if it seemed like he wasn't the Heir, they were going ahead with the plan. Iliana was glad for this, as it gave her something to distract herself with.

The potion was only half done, though; they hadn't yet gotten the last ingredients.

"What we need is a diversion," Hermione said. "Then we can sneak into Snape's office and take what we need."

Iliana and Ron looked nervously at one another.

"I think I'd better do the actual stealing," Hermione continued. "Snape pays far too much attention to you two for it to escape his notice you've slipped out. He'd never suspect me of it, though, as I have a clean record. So you two will just have to keep him busy with something for five minutes or so while I grab what we need."

Iliana nodded mutely, feeling a little ill. Deliberately cause mayhem in Snape's class? She didn't think looking like her mum would save her from his wrath if he found out she'd done that. But she agreed anyway.

That Thursday's Potions lesson, Iliana was so worried about the planned mayhem that she almost melted her cauldron. It didn't help that Zoey and the others were having a discussion Inside without her. A discussion that was also _about_ her.

 _ **She's so nervous, she's gonna give us away,**_ argued Al. _**One of us needs to take her place.**_

 _But how?_ Asked Harry. _Snape will spot the glow when we transform. And seizing control of her body might not work well enough._

 _ **Hmm... now you mention it, that glow is a tactical disadvantage. What if we needed to transform in a dark room, when an enemy like Moldywart might see us?**_

 _Don't worry! I'll give it a try!_

Before they could stop her, Zoey pulled Iliana back In, and then concentrated very hard. When Snape was looking away, she did it; there were a couple false starts where a small amount of light came out, but finally – her entire Will focused on the task – the body shrunk without making any light. Zoey sat there, sweating from the effort. Everyone else was so intent on their potions that nobody appeared to have noticed her change.

She nudged Ron to get his attention, then did the same for Hermione. Once she had their attention, she managed to communicate with them about the plan via very subtle mime. They nodded, understanding that it was time.

With Snape's attention still elsewhere, Zoey screwed up her concentration again, using her wandless magic to make Goyle's cauldron explode, showering the whole class with Swelling Solution. People shrieked as splashes of the Swelling Solution hit them. Malfoy got a faceful and his nose began to swell like a balloon; Goyle blundered around, his hands over his eyes, which had expanded to the size of a dinner plate — Snape was trying to restore calm and find out what had happened. Through the confusion, Zoey saw Hermione slip quietly into Snape's office. Ducking behind something, she switched back to Iliana, whose expression of horror fit perfectly into the chaos.

Snape yelled for silence, vowing to get whoever was responsible, something Iliana didn't hear because Zoey started singing the Piña Colada song at top volume in their head the moment Snape opened his mouth to speak. This so vexed Iliana that her expression remained believable to the situation even when Snape – after having Deflated everyone – stared right into her eyes as though determined to find wrong-doing. Iliana didn't even notice he was staring at her, she was so distracted and confused, though the others did.

Ten minutes later, they were in Myrtle's bathroom again, Hermione adding the ingredients she'd stolen.

"It'll be ready in two weeks," she said happily.

The next week, Hermione, Ron, and Al (the collective had taken pity on Iliana at last) were walking across the entrance hall when they spotted a bunch of people reading a notice on the notice board. They went up to investigate, and saw it was a notice about a new Dueling Club.

"Good idea," Al said. "Given how much Moldy wants us dead, we could use some dueling practice."

"Yeah, and being your friends, we should do it, too. You-Know-Who's bound to go after us, too, eventually," Ron said. "Though I don't know what good it'd do against Slytherin's monster."

At 8 o'clock that evening, they all congregated in the Great Hall, where the Dueling Club was to be located. The long dining tables were gone, and a golden stage had been set up against one wall.

"I wonder who's teaching us? Someone said Flitwick was a dueling champion in his youth."

"As long as it isn't... oh Hell." Al said, groaning. Lockhart had stepped onto the stage, followed by Snape. The man's gaze searched the room and found Al with a grimace of hatred. Al frowned back at the man; though he was sure Snape hadn't suspected them at the time, Snape had been keeping an extra eye on them ever since the day after the cauldron explosion, so he seemed to suspect they'd stolen from his office, somehow.

 _ **Well two can play that game,**_ Al thought, deciding to observe Snape as much as he could from now on. The man was so hard to read with his heart-reading ability that it couldn't hurt to see if scientific observation could help. Zoey sent him an image of her dilligently writing notes down on paper, which made the corners of his mouth twitch in response.

Lockhart waved an arm for silence and called, "Gather round, gather round! Can everyone see me? Can you all hear me? Excellent!

"Now, Professor Dumbledore has granted me permission to start this little dueling club, to train you all in case you ever need to defend yourselves as I myself have done on countless occasions — for full details, see my published works.

"Let me introduce my assistant, Professor Snape," said Lockhart, flashing a wide smile. "He tells me he knows a tiny little bit about dueling himself and has sportingly agreed to help me with a short demonstration before we begin. Now, I don't want any of you youngsters to worry — you'll still have your Potions master when I'm through with him, never fear!"

"Hey, maybe Snape will kill Lockhart for us. Wouldn't that be a hoot?" Al whispered at Ron.

Snape's upper lip curled. He looked like he didn't want to wait much longer to kill Lockhart. But Lockhart was, of course, oblivious.

Lockhart and Snape turned to face each other and bowed; at least, Lockhart did, with much twirling of his hands, whereas Snape jerked his head irritably. Then they raised their wands like swords in front of them.

"As you see, we are holding our wands in the accepted combative position," Lockhart told the silent crowd. "On the count of three, we will cast our first spells. Neither of us will be aiming to kill, of course."

"I wouldn't bet on that," Al murmured, watching Snape baring his teeth.

"One, two, three!"

Both of them swung their wands above their heads and pointed them at their opponent; Snape cried: "Expelliarmus!" There was a dazzling flash of scarlet light and Lockhart was blasted off his feet: He flew backward off the stage, smashed into the wall, and slid down it to sprawl on the floor.

Some of the Slytherins cheered. Al frowned. It really was hard to decide who to root for. He didn't like either of these men.

"You think he's alright?" Hermione asked.

"Who cares?" Al and Ron said in stereo.

Lockhart bleated on some more like a confused goat, the gist of which was they'd be having the kids pair up to try it. Snape got to Al before he could pair with Ron. The batlike man grimaced the special, extra-hateful grimace always reserved for Al, and then paired Al with Malfoy, and Hermione with a Slytherin girl called Millicent Bulstrode.

Far from being annoyed, though, Al grinned. "Good. Love a good challenge."

Malfoy strutted over, smirking. Al smirked right back at him. This, along with Al's height, gave the Slytherin boy a slight pause.

"Intimidated, Malfoy?"

"You wish, Potter."

"Face your partners," called Lockhart, "and bow."

Al and Malfoy barely even nodded at one another.

"On the count of three, disarm only. _Only_ to disarm them. We don't want any accidents."

Al snorted. He already knew Malfoy wouldn't be abiding by that rule. The little twerp never met a rule he wouldn't break if he thought he could get away with it.

"Wands at the ready! When I count to three. One, two-"

Malfoy started at two, something Al had read in his body language, and jumped out of the way just in time. Wasting no time, he shot a 'Rictumsempra' hex at Malfoy, knocking the boy over with silver light, the wind knocked out of him.

"I said disarm only!" shouted Lockhart, as Malfoy sunk to his knees. The Tickling Hex had him laughing so hard he couldn't move. But Al remained wary, just in case.

Gasping for breath, Malfoy tried shooting a spell at Al's knees, but Al jumped aside again and shot another spell at Malfoy, which knocked him onto his back.

"Stop! Stop!"

Snape sneered at Lockhart, and took charge. He undid the Tickling Hex and helped Malfoy to his feet.

The room was full of a haze of green smoke. Ron's old and decrepit wand was the source, and Ron was apologizing to Seamus for whatever it had done. Hermione was being held in a headlock by Millicent; Al went over to pull them apart, but that was difficult; though bigger than his peers in Griffindor, Millicent – also in his year – was the same size as him.

Then the pompous prat Lockhart tried teaching them the shield charm, and did so badly he dropped his wand. But of course, he pretended like his wand had gotten overexcited.

 _Tis a poor workman who blames his tools,_ Harry quoted. Al nodded.

Al and Malfoy got paired up to demonstrate this spell further. Al was annoyed; shown how to do it by a competent teacher, he would have had no problem with the shield charm. As it was, there was no way he could do the spell until he saw somebody else do it, and Snape wasn't being so helpful.

In fact, Snape seemed to be helping Malfoy, by whispering something in his ear. Al frowned; he knew this couldn't be good.

They got in place, and Lockhart counted down again. On three, Malfoy raised his wand and shouted, "Serpentsortia."

The end of his wand exploded, and out came a long black snake, looking poised to strike. Al stared at it, thunderstruck. He knew of only one way to deal with a snake, and he didn't dare do it here.

"Don't move, Potter, I'll get it for you," Snape said.

"Allow me," said Lockhart.

As though time were slowing down, Al watched in horror, too slow to stop the idiot, as the man did some spell that threw the snake into the air and made it land with an angry slap on the ground. The snake, frightened and angry, rounded on the closest available person, and Al – without thinking – shouted, _'DOWN!'_ at the snake, even gesturing downward for emphasis. _'LEAVE HIM BE!'_

At his tone, the snake turned to look at him, then slumped down meekly. It made no more move, even as Snape destroyed it with his wand. But now the cat was out of the bag. And by the look of it, his emphatic gesture hadn't helped.

"Well everyone don't thank me for saving Justin's life all at once," he said.

"What do you think you're playing at?" shouted Justin, looking terrified.

"Gee, I could've sworn that was English that time. I just saved your life, you prat. You're welcome."

Snape, too, was looking at Al strangely. It was a shrewd and calculating look. Al wanted to return the look, but now he was beginning to notice the ominous muttering.

"Bugger," he said.

"Come on, let's get out of here," Ron said in his ear. Al didn't resist. The idiots were going to think whatever they wanted, the truth be buggered.

Ron and Hermione dragged him through the crowd of people who were giving him a wide berth, and didn't stop dragging him until they were all three alone in the Griffindor common room.

"You're a Parselmouth. Why didn't you tell us?"

"Gee, you find out from Dumbledore that Zoey being able to ask a grass snake about its day and get an intelligible answer back means you have a rare gift that makes people think you're evil, wow... I can't think of a single reason why I wouldn't tell anyone about that, can you?" Al said, his words oozing sarcasm.

"You've done it before?"

"Yeah. Remember I told you I set a whole bunch of snakes loose on Dudley's birthday? Well I guess I was doing it then. And we've done it in secret with Aqua."

"You talk with your pet snake?"

"Uh huh. And before I set all those snakes loose at the zoo, I'd been talking with a boa constrictor about its origins, and it was responding. Well, not with words. Might've done, though, if Dudley hadn't pushed me to the ground. I went a bit mad with power at that, started shouting 'Be free, my pretties' as all the reptiles in the zoo escaped. Sicced them on Dudley and my aunt and uncle, too, before I ran off."

Ron nodded absent-mindedly, as though unsure what to say to that. Finally, though, he spoke again.

"What did you say to that snake, just now?"

"I said 'DOWN!' and 'LEAVE HIM BE!' And, as you saw, it backed down. But nobody else seemed to notice that. Wait... do tell me you noticed that?"

"Yeah, kinda. But I was a bit distracted by hearing you hiss and spit without drawing breath. That was downright creepy; no wonder Justin panicked."

Al nodded. "Uh huh. But you know, I wonder why it sounds like that, anyway? Snakes can't hear very well, they mostly hear through their bellies. So that hissing and spitting can't really be their language. It's not what I hear when they speak to me, anyway. Maybe it just sounds that way to humans because it's what we expect it to sound like, and it's more like... magical inter-species telepathy?"

"What's telepathy?"

"It's direct mind-to-mind communication."

"Oh. Well anyway, is this really the time to dissect Parseltongue? Your secret's out, and now the whole school probably thinks you're the Heir of Slytherin."

"What? Why's that?"

"You mean you don't know? Slytherin was famous for being a Parselmouth. That's why his house's symbol is a snake."

"Oh lovely. I... wait a minute... Slytherin was a Parselmouth?"

"That's what I just said, isn't it?"

"Slytherin could speak with snakes?"

"Well yeah."

"I wonder if the monster is some kind of magical snake monster, then?"

The two of them blinked at him. Then Hermione slapped herself on the head.

"That makes so much sense! Al, didn't you say you lot heard a scary voice? And you were following it when we found Mrs. Norris. What if you were hearing the monster speaking?"

"Or whoever's controlling it," Ron added.

"That makes sense. Now, do we know of any magical snake creatures?"

At this, Hermione faltered. "Well, no. I mean, there's the ashwinder, a snake that forms in magical fires that have been left to burn unchecked, but it doesn't do anything at all like this creature does. It just lays its eggs and dies. Only the eggs are dangerous; if they hatch, they burn houses down."

"Well there _were_ scorch marks on the floor by Moaning Myrtle's bathroom."

"Yes, Al, but nothing else fits. We're going to have to look in the library to try to find it."

"Okay, guys, great. But Al and the others are still going to be thought of as Slytherin's Heir."

"But I'm not!"

"You could be. He died a thousand years ago. You'll have an awful hard time proving you're not."

They lay in bed that night, tossing and turning for hours, unable to stop thinking. They didn't want to be related to Slytherin, but if Al had had his way under the Sorting Hat, they would be in Slytherin now.

Al would just have to explain to Justin later in Herbology, if that would do any good, even though any idiot could have seen he'd saved Justin's life, and been grateful.

This did not turn out as planned, however; for the next morning they awoke to find there'd been a blizzard so bad that Herbology was cancelled. Al spent a long time by the Griffindor fire angry about Justin's stupidity, everyone's stupidity, and finally Hermione told him to go find Justin to explain. Not wanting to stay there and stew anymore, Al went to the library to look for Justin.

What he found, instead, were a bunch of Hufflepuffs having a secretive discussion. He hid, and eavesdropped.

"So anyway," a stout boy was saying, "I told Justin to hide up in our dormitory. I mean to say, if Potter's marked him down as his next victim, it's best if he keeps a low profile for a while. Of course, Justin's been waiting for something like this to happen ever since he let slip to Potter he was Muggle-born. Justin actually told him he'd been down for Eton. That's not the kind of thing you bandy about with Slytherin's heir on the loose, is it?"

"You definitely think it is Potter, then, Ernie?" said a girl with blonde pigtails anxiously.

"Hannah," said the stout boy solemnly, "he's a Parselmouth. Everyone knows that's the mark of a Dark wizard. Have you ever heard of a decent one who could talk to snakes? They called Slytherin himself Serpent-tongue."

There was some heavy murmuring at this, and Ernie went on, "Remember what was written on the wall? Enemies of the Heir, Beware. Potter had some sort of run-in with Filch. Next thing we know, Filch's cat's attacked. That first year, Creevey, was annoying Iliana at the Quidditch match, taking pictures of her while she was lying in the mud. Next thing we know — Creevey's been attacked."

"They always seem so nice, though," said Hannah uncertainly, "Iliana and Harry, anyway. That Alastair has a bit of a sarcastic mouth on him, but otherwise seems okay. And Iliana was so distraught about Colin."

"I heard she wasn't crying until later in the day, or looked like she'd been crying. She was in the hospital wing, surely she would have known before anyone else that Colin was in there. So I don't think she was crying about him."

"Now that's not fair, Ernie. Maybe she was in shock before. Not everyone grieves the same way; I had a cousin who didn't cry for their grandmother until a whole two weeks after she'd died."

"Hannah, why would she be crying over him anyway? She barely knew the kid."

Hannah didn't have an answer for this. Instead, she said, "Well, they're the ones who made You-Know-Who disappear. They can't be all bad, can they?"

Ernie lowered his voice mysteriously, the Hufflepuffs bent closer, and Al edged nearer so that he could catch Ernie's words.

"No one knows how he survived that attack by You-Know-Who. I mean to say, he was only a baby when it happened. He should have been blasted into smithereens. Only a really powerful Dark wizard could have survived a curse like that." He dropped his voice until it was barely more than a whisper, and said, "That's probably why You-Know-Who wanted to kill him in the first place. Didn't want another Dark Lord competing with him. Then there's that whole thing of transforming into other people. And I've heard some stories about people with multiple personalities. You can't trust them, there's usually an evil one in the mix somewhere. Besides, I wonder what other powers Potter's been hiding?"

He couldn't take it anymore. Stepping forward, he said, "Actually, it was my mother and father dying to protect me, that saved my life. I don't know all the details myself, but Dumbledore says it's powerful magic, sacrificing yourself for another."

The way they all looked, you'd think he was a monster shouting Woogedy Boogedy at them.

"First of all," he said, walking slowly towards them. "That whole 'evil alters' thing is a load of shit. It's just that the whole 'I'm not responsible for murdering that man, it was my evil altar' thing is a popular defense. But it's right up there with 'evil twin,' 'the devil made me do it, and 'it wasn't me, it was the one armed man' as excuses. Meaning that I'm sure at least 95% of the idiots claiming that defense are liars and aren't Multiples at all.

"So whatever you think you know about Multiples is most assuredly rubbish. Especially if you're believing tripe about evil alters. We're people, we're no more or less likely to be evil than anyone else. And less so, given that we can hear one another's thoughts and feel each other's feelings."

"You were listening to our private conversation, then?"

"Well I _was_ here to speak with Justin Finch-Fletchley, but found you were talking loud enough for anyone to hear, so I decided to eavesdrop a little, yes."

"W-what do you want with Justin?"

"To explain that I was telling the snake to leave him alone. It was the only thing I could think of to save his life after that prat Lockhart pissed it off. I mean honestly, didn't you see that it moved toward him before I said anything, and that it backed down as soon as I told it to stop?"

"All I saw," said Ernie stubbornly, though he was trembling as he spoke, "was you speaking Parseltongue and chasing the snake toward Justin."

"I didn't chase it at him!" Al said, his voice shaking with anger. "It didn't even touch him!"

"It was a very near miss," said Ernie. "And in case you're getting ideas," he added hastily, "I might tell you that you can trace my family back through nine generations of witches and warlocks and my blood's as pure as anyone's, so —"

"I don't care what sort of blood you've got!" said Al and Harry fiercely, though nobody would have been able to hear Harry with Al's being the body they were using. "Why would I want to attack Muggle-borns? One of my best friends is Muggle born, and the other is a Weasley. Hell, I thought I _was_ a Muggle til Dumbledore told me I was a wizard, my aunt and uncle were so afraid of magic I never knew all the odd stuff I was doing – all the stuff we were doing – was magic!"

"We've heard rumors about your aunt and uncle. They abused you, and that's why you don't live with them anymore. Sounds like motive to hate Muggles to me!"

"Yes, they abused Harry. And us, I think we were there the whole time. But never so badly that we went full-blown MPD with blackouts and all. And anyway, we knew plenty of good Muggles, we're not going to hate all Muggles because we hated our guardians. We're not that kind of people."

"Yeah? Well..." Ernie said, plainly not wanting to lose this argument, "you're a Parselmouth, so I don't believe a word you say anyway!"

Al felt a sudden, strange calm come over him.

"Fine. Fine, if you're going to not listen to me, if you're going to insist on villifying me for no good reason, then... then... _'Hiss hiss, motherfuckers!'_ " he ended in Parseltongue, lifting his hands up dramatically, scaring them all so badly that Ms. Pince came over to shush them all.

"No, get off me you old bat! You know what, McMillan? _'Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!'_ "

The situation was rapidly breaking down. Ms. Pince was shouting, the Hufflepuffs were shouting, Al was alternating between shouting in English and in Parseltongue, and it was probably the most hubbub the library had seen in its entire lifetime.

Finally, though, Ms. Pince shoved Al out the door and slammed it behind him just after he shouted, _'I FART IN YOUR GENERAL DIRECTION!'_

In a huff, grumbling under his voice, trying to ignore Aqua in his robes chuckling at the funny things he'd been saying in Parseltongue, not paying attention to where he was or where he was going, he ran smack into Hagrid, covered in snow and holding two dead roosters.

"Hi Hagrid."

"Hey Al. Whatcha doin outta class?"

"Class was cancelled. What about you?"

Hagrid held up a limp rooster.

"Second one killed this term," he explained. "It's either foxes or a Blood-Suckin' Bugbear, an' I need the headmaster's permission ter put a charm around the hen coop."

He peered more closely at Al from under his thick, snow-flecked eyebrows.

"Yeh sure yeh're all righ'? Yeh look all hot an' bothered —"

Al couldn't bring himself to repeat what Ernie and the rest of the Hufflepuffs had been saying about him.

"It's nothing," he said. "I'd better get going, Hagrid, it's Transfiguration next and I've got to pick up my books."

He walked off, his mind still full of what Ernie had said about him.

 _"Justin's been waiting for something like this to happen ever since he let slip to Potter he was Muggle-born. …"_

Al stamped up the stairs and turned along another corridor, which was particularly dark; the torches had been extinguished by a strong, icy draft that was blowing through a loose windowpane. He was halfway down the passage when he tripped headlong over something lying on the floor.

He turned to squint at what he'd fallen over and felt as though his stomach had dissolved.

Justin Finch-Fletchley was lying on the floor, rigid and cold, a look of shock frozen on his face, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. And that wasn't all. Next to him was another figure, the strangest sight Al had ever seen.

It was Nearly Headless Nick, no longer pearly-white and transparent, but black and smoky, floating immobile and horizontal, six inches off the floor. His head was half off and his face wore an expression of shock identical to Justin's.

"Nope," Al said. "Nope, I'm out of here."

He began to turn around the way he came, but then Peeves appeared. Al broke into a run.

Floating ahead of Al, Peeves said, "Naughty naughty little Potty, no running in the hallsies! What is little Potty running from, any..."

Peeves trailed off, stopping in midair, having noticed Justin and Nick at last. Al ran into Peeves, who was oddly solid for a poltergeist, and fell over backwards.

Grinning, Peeves filled his lungs and, before Al could stop him, screamed, "ATTACK! ATTACK! ANOTHER ATTACK! NO MORTAL OR GHOST IS SAFE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! ATTAAAACK!"

"Damn it all," Al said, resignedly, as all the doors in the area crashed open and people ran out into the halls, an action that was stupidly dangerous but very human. Then the Hufflepuffs came in from the library, and Ernie McMillain pointed at him and shouted, "Caught in the act!"

Peeves was bobbing overhead, now grinning wickedly, surveying the scene; Peeves always loved chaos. As the teachers bent over Justin and Nearly Headless Nick, examining them, Peeves broke into song:

 _"Oh, Potter, you rotter, oh, what have you done,_

 _You're killing off students, you think it's good fun —"_

"That's enough, Peeves!" barked Professor McGonagall, and Peeves zoomed away backward, with his tongue out at Al.

Justin was carried up to the hospital wing by Professor Flitwick and Professor Sinistra of the Astronomy department, but nobody seemed to know what to do for Nearly Headless Nick. In the end, Professor McGonagall conjured a large fan out of thin air, which she gave to Ernie with instructions to waft Nearly Headless Nick up the stairs. This Ernie did, fanning Nick along like a silent black hovercraft. This left Al and Professor McGonagall alone together.

"This way, Potter," she said.

"Professor," said Al at once, "we had nothing to do with this!"

"This is out of my hands, Potter," said Professor McGonagall curtly.

They marched in silence around a corner and she stopped before a large and extremely ugly stone gargoyle.

"Lemon drop!" she said. This was evidently a password, because the gargoyle sprang suddenly to life and hopped aside as the wall behind him split in two. Even full of dread for what was coming, Al couldn't fail to be amazed; he felt the others' amazement, as well. Behind the wall was a spiral staircase that was moving smoothly upward, like an escalator. As he and Professor McGonagall stepped onto it, Al heard the wall thud closed behind them. They rose upward in circles, higher and higher, until at last, slightly dizzy, Al saw a gleaming oak door ahead, with a brass knocker in the shape of a griffin.

He knew now where he was being taken. This must be where Dumbledore lived.

 _ **Well that's one way to find him to talk with him.**_


	10. Polyjuice Potion

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 10"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Ten: Polyjuice Potion

Note: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

Note 3: It struck me that while I have different styles for the internal speech of _**Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ and _Zoey_ , I didn't have a different one for Iliana. There aren't many choices that translate over to FF, AO3, and BigCloset, so I went with **_**this (bold, italic, and underlined)**_** _ _ **.**__ Which is also sometimes used for emphasis in Al's speech.

The collective was in a panic. Only Al was calm, his fury at Ernie and being falsely accused keeping him steady while Harry and Iliana had a panic-stricken internal conversation without him. Tier was agitated too, and Zoey was crying. They were all worried they'd be kicked out of school for this, which was absurd but then, a lot about the wizarding world was absurd.

The internal chaos paused in shock as they took in the amazing sight of Dumbledore's office, with its strange whirring and puffing machines of silver and gold, the many portraits of old headmasters that were snoozing in their frames, and the Sorting Hat.

Al looked at the hat and had an idea. He put it on. It was still too large for him.

A small voice said in their ear, "Ah, the Potters. I'd heard rumors. I can see a bit more clearly now what confused me that first time. Anyway, bee in your bonnet, Potters?"

"Oh, a hat pun, how clever," said Al sardonically. "Hats off to you for that clever wordplay."

The hat chuckled.

"But yes, I had a question. I know this probably violates some privacy policy or something, but it's kind of important. Is there anybody in this school who might be the Heir of Slytherin."

"You're right, Alastair Potter, I could not tell you, even if I knew."

"So you don't know. Well that's interesting."

"Whoever it is might not have known they were the Heir when they came in," the hat said. "Or they might have been hiding it. I tend to find a number of students, purebloods mostly, and especially Slytherins, tend to be a lot harder to read than other students. They've been taught secrets from an early age. But don't let that color your opinions of people. Everyone has some degree of secrets. Why, I couldn't get a good read on you at first, either."

"Well thank you," Al said, taking the hat off and putting it back. Then a gagging noise behind him startled him, and he saw what looked like a plucked chicken, but skinnier and longer, sitting on a perch.

"Oh crap. You look unwell."

It did indeed look unwell. It was sallow, its eyes had the exhausted look of illness, and as he spoke several more feathers fell out. Then, as he looked at it, it burst into flames, startling him so much he fell backwards. He looked around in panic for water, but too late; it shrieked one last time, then turned to ash before his eyes.

"Jesus Christ," Al shouted, horrified.

"Funny you should mention that most famous of wizards," Dumbledore said, shocking Al again (he hadn't heard the man enter the room). "The two have a lot in common, strangely enough."

"Professor. Your bird, I couldn't do anything, I... wait a minute," Al said, taking in Dumbledore's words. "Let me guess, your bird is a phoenix."

"Aha! Yes indeed, you guessed correctly. How did you know, my dear boy?"

"Well, the Muggles know a surprising amount about magical creatures; I suppose it wasn't possible to purge their whole history of stories about cerberuses, phoenixes, centaurs, and other creatures."

"Ah yes, that. You're correct of course. Now, my dear lad, what brings you to my office?"

"There was another attack. A double attack. Justin Finch-Fletchley and Sir Nicolas."

"Ah, and I take it you once more found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time?"

"Yes. McGonagall seemed to think-"

"Not to worry, Alastair, not to-"

The door slammed open, making Al jump. It was Hagrid, still holding the dead roosters.

"It wasn' Al, Professor Dumbledore!" said Hagrid urgently. "I was talkin ter him seconds before that kid was found, he never had time-"

Dumbledore tried to interject, but Hagrid kept rambling on. Al found Hagrid's passion touching but also bizarre, and made note of it in case it foreshadowed something.

"Hagrid, Hagrid!" Dumbledore finally managed to get Hagrid's attention. "I do not think either Alastair or any member of their collective attacked those people or the cat."

"Oh," Hagrid said, relaxing. "Right, I'll wait outside, then, Headmaster." He stomped out looking embarrassed.

"I appreciate your confidence, Headmaster," Al said, "but I'm a bit curious how you're so sure it wasn't me."

"As I said before, Al, it is magic far beyond your age level."

"Yes, but the story goes that it's a monster doing these things. I could be controlling the monster."

"I find, generally speaking, that the guilty do not admit it could have been them. There are exceptions, of course, but the guilty usually look to place the blame anywhere but on themselves."

"Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So we're not going to get kicked out?"

"You have done nothing worth such an extreme punishment, to my knowledge."

Al felt Iliana give a guilty squirm thinking about the illegal polyjuice potion they were brewing in Myrtle's bathroom, but ignored it.

"Oh, hey, I just remembered something. Someone told me Slytherin was a Parselmouth. Well it turns out I am, too. And then Ron said Voldemort is one as well, so that got us thinking... well, I think it's Voldemort somehow."

Dumbledore nodded. "Yes, that was my conclusion as well. But I do not know _how_."

"Yeah, we wondered that, too. Maybe he came in in a box?"

"The problem is, the only followers of his who believe he is still alive are all in Azkaban. That's Wizarding Britain's prison. So I do not know who could be helping him."

"We had another theory, sir. You see, we heard a terrifying voice a couple times. A voice nobody else could hear. Once a few days before the first attack, and then just before we found Mrs. Norris. We didn't mention it before because we didn't know what to make of it, it could've been in our head."

"Understandable. Go on."

"Well we figured out it was Parseltongue. So we think the monster, whatever it is, is some sort of magical snake. Because if Slytherin could control it, and Moldywart could control it, then it stands to reason they used Parseltongue to control it."

"An excellent theory, Alastair. But now I must stop you. Despite how well you did against Professor Quirrell last year, it really is very dangerous to hunt down these clues. You are only 12 years old, my boy. You barely survived against Quirrell, and I fear losing you to whatever this monster is. I must ask you, for your own safety and the safety of Miss Granger and Mr. Weasley, to stop looking into this. You have done your due dilligence, and I thank you for the information. We adults will take it from here."

Al glared at Dumbledore. "Oh, you're going with that angle, are you?"

"The angle of keeping a charge of mine safe, in a place I thought should be safe? Especially now that the protection of your mother's blood is broken? Yes, I am taking that angle with you."

Dumbledore began to pace back and forth. "If I had known something like this would happen, I would not have let you break that protection. If it meant putting someone in the house with you to protect you from Petunia and Vernon's wrath, I would have done it. I regret that decision, now."

"Yeah, well, given how much grief that protection gave Iliana, I'm glad to be shot of it."

"Yes, well... Alastair, I must ask you, on behalf of the entire collective, to swear you will not go prying any further into this mystery. Swear it, please?"

Al sighed. "You're not going to let me leave until I swear it, are you?"

"You have guessed correctly. If I have to tutor you myself to keep you safe, I will."

 _ **Zoey? Cross your fingers.**_

 _Yes indeedily!_ Zoey replied, sending him an image of her crossing eight of her fingers in pairs. _And my toes!_

 _ **Good.**_

"I give you my word, and the word of the entire Potter collective, that we will not go digging into the Chamber of Secrets or related mysteries, and leave sorting that out to the adults."

Dumbledore looked into his eyes as he said that, trying to read their mind, Al was certain, and must have liked what he saw, because he twinkled at Al.

"Good. Thank you, Alastair. You may go now."

And go he did. They were all the way out of the staircase before Zoey asked, _Can I uncross my finnies and toesies now?_

 _ **Yes.**_

Al did not tell Hermione or Ron what Dumbledore had made him promise. Hermione would dump the potion and insist they keep their word if he told her, and Ron would act weirdly around Hermione until she figured out what he was hiding, if he told Ron. He settled on telling them that Dumbledore had been very quiet, lost in thought, barely noticing anything Al said, and not responding with anything useful. This frustrated the others just as much as Al was frustrated with Dumbledore. Having successfully lied to his friends, Al felt weariness overcome him, and had Zoey pull him back In. With a glow of transformation that was much less bright than normal, Harry appeared.

The double attack had everyone in a right panic, especially since one of the victims had been a ghost. So it was that hardly anyone was staying behind for Christmas. Harry and company, because they had nowhere else to go (though they were surprised Dumbledore wasn't sending them off like Dobby would have liked) and Ron and Hermione of course. Also Malfoy and his two goons, for some reason, which worked in their favor.

Harry was glad of this, though; he was getting just as many terrified and sometimes defiant looks as Al would have done, and he was getting thoroughly sick of it. It would be good to have some time away from all that.

Snape was watching them just as much as he had been, if not more. They always made sure to stare blandly back at him. They'd been watching him like a hawk in turn, and learning a lot from it. Though Snape had some ability to block Al's heart-reading, he gave away clues to his mood and thoughts in his movements; everyone did, it was impossible to not. So after several days of intense observation, they could grin to themselves with the knowledge that they could tell some of what Snape was thinking and feeling. It was only broad strokes, no details, but still useful.

When the Weasley Twins, having not learned their lesson when Iliana had snapped at them before, said to Percy one day, "Harry's in a hurry, better get out of his way so he can have tea with his fanged servant," Harry grabbed them both by the ear.

"OW! Harry, leggo! Geroff us!"

"Yeah, ow! We're sorry! We're sorry!"

"You boys," Harry said waspishly, "think you're so funny, and usually you are, but we don't like you joking about this. We're glad you think it's absurd that we're the Heir, but please try to express this sentiment in another way."

"Yes, we promise!"

"Cross our hearts, hope to die-"

"Stick a needle in our eye!"

"Good," Harry said, letting them go and walking away with his nose in the air.

Fred turned to George. "Is it just my imagination, or was that Iliana using Harry's body?"

"I dunno. But yeah, does seem a bit girlish, the way he's walking right now. But not quite the way Iliana moves, I think. And Zoey kinda skips, even when she's walking. So not her, either."

"Is there someone else in there we don't know about, maybe?"

George shrugged. "No idea. Anyway, let's go before he decides to come back and get our other ears."

Ginny, who'd been nearby as well, watched them go. She looked back at Harry. She wished, if Iliana really had been using the body just then, that she'd come Out. Iliana was easier to talk to than Harry; Ginny had a crush on Harry, but not on Iliana. And she very much wanted to talk with Iliana. But when she'd been Out earlier, Iliana hadn't been in the mood to speak. Ginny sighed, and walked on.

When the term ended, the snow deep on the ground, Harry found that Fred, George, and Ginny had decided to stay at school as well. Apparently, the Weasley matriarch and her husband were going to Egypt to spend some time with Bill, their eldest son, and didn't have enough for the whole family to go.

Harry had mixed feelings about being Out. He liked it, yes, because he hated being a backseat driver in his own body, but at the same time, whenever he wasn't studying or spending time with his friends, he kept looking at his hair in the mirror, wishing it would lay flat like Al's or Iliana's. He had also found a very small hair on his chin the other day, and was still in a bit of a panic about it. He remembered reading about puberty, and he'd thought he would have more time. He couldn't pin down exactly why it made him anxious, beyond knowing his body would be completely changed; and unlike switching from one member of the collective to another, this would be a permanent change. He liked his voice, and his body, mostly. He didn't want a deeper voice, or body hair, or facial hair. He liked the thought of being taller, but that was it.

He also kept feeling uncomfortable around his chest, for some reason. He found himself staring surreptitiously at older girls. Being a boy, he was sure this was normal, but something about what he felt when he looked at them didn't feel like what he observed in other boys. It didn't feel like what Iliana had felt for Oliver Wood once, either. All in all, he was very confused. He knew being confused was normal for someone in puberty, but he had the niggling sense that this was different, somehow; he just couldn't put his finger on how. And the others had no more idea about it than he did.

What was most peculiar to him was that he felt most comfortable when they shifted to Iliana's form, even though he didn't like being out of control of the body. Even Zoey's form was more comfortable to him than either his or Al's. Just something about how those bodies moved felt better to him, more natural. And every moment he stood there before the mirror, trying to sort it all out, the more frustrated he became. Which gave him more excuse to spend time with others, when he could, to distract himself from the confusion.

On Christmas day, Harry woke up early and was brooding in front of the mirror, attacking his unruly hair with a comb, when Hermione came in. He barely glanced at her as she went by him and opened up Ron's curtain.

"Wake up," she told Ron.

"You're not supposed to be here," Ron protested. "Harry, why didn't you stop her?"

"I dunno. Didn't seem important."

"Merry Christmas to you too," Hermione said. "I've been up nearly an hour, adding more lacewings to the potion. It's ready."

Harry turned in place to look at her. "You sure?"

"Positive. If we're going to do it, it should be tonight."

She turned to look at Harry. "Harry, what's upsetting you?"

"What? Oh nothing, just my hair. Wish it would stay flat."

"Have you tried Sleakeazy's Hair Potion? It's said to tame even the wildest hair. I don't bother myself, it takes me hours to get it to work, but it might work better on yours."

"Thanks, I'll try that."

They went downstairs and started opening presents. Ron got him a book called 'The Shield Spell: Tips and Tricks.' Harry was glad; he knew it couldn't be easy buying gifts for them, they all had different interests, but this was something he, Iliana, and Al would find useful. Ron also got a gift for Zoey, a cheap magical toy teddy bear, pocket sized, that walked around and occasionally scratched its head in a bemused way. This was surprising because Ron was poor, but the bear turned out to be one of Ron's old toys, and the book was second hand but in fair condition.

Hermione had bought them a magical fountain pen that never ran out of ink and had a rounded tip for easier writing, as well as a spell on it to prevent ink spills. Al was especially pleased by this; he didn't know how to create paper out of nowhere, had no paper of his own, and ballpoint pens didn't write worth crud on parchment, so he'd been having a lot of difficulties. From Ron's parents he got a large plum cake and a hand-knitted Weasley sweater with all their initials on it – A.P., H.P., I.P., Z.P., and thankfully just T for Tier.

Harry and the others, for their part, had given as good as they got. He gave Ron a book called "Flying With The Cannons," all about Ron's favorite team the Chudley Cannons. Hermione got a magical organizer that could be set to remind you about important events, and had a piece of bewitched parchment fused to the back cover that could store thousands of pages of notes on it – just tap the green corner when you were done writing a page, and it would move on to the next empty page, automatically storing anything you wrote on the page for later. You could move through the pages with the blue and yellow corners, or sort by subject by tapping the red corner.

"And it's password protected, too," Harry said. "Or rather, it can be set to be password protected. It's not set that way right now, though."

"Wow, Harry! This is amazing!" Hermione hugged him ecstatically.

As she took off to go test out her new organizer, Ron gave him an amused grin.

"Only Hermione could get that excited over an organizer."

"Probably. But I got one for myself as well. The password makes it just as useful as a journal as it does for notes. I've already got a journal started in it."

"Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that. Where'd you get it? Maybe you can get me one next year."

"Or your birthday?"

"Or then, yeah."

"I think a new wand would be more useful, don't you?"

"Er..." Ron looked at his old and dying wand. Even now it was sparking a little, like a live wire. "Maybe there's a new wand from Mum and Dad. Let me look."

But there was no new wand. Just a sweater, an extra large cake, and a note saying they didn't have the money to get him a new wand.

Ron pouted. "Can't get me a new wand, but they can go to Egypt to visit Bill. Granted, he's probably feeding them on his money, but still..."

"Does it cost money to go to Egypt? Like, I know it costs money to take an airplane or a boat that far. Does the Floo network operate outside of Britain?"

"Nah. Well, it works in Scotland and Wales, too, obviously. But it doesn't go anywhere internationally. Can't cross water. Anyway, Mum doesn't like broom travel, and doesn't have one of her own. Nor does Dad. Nah, they'll have taken a portkey, most like. And those aren't cheap. Their use is restricted by the Ministry; only authorized people are allowed to make them."

Even with the tiny number of people staying behind, the castle still looked amazing in its Christmas decorations, and the feast was still sinfully good. Even fretting about taking Polyjuice Potion later, they all became stuffed like Christmas geese with the delicious food. They were just finishing their third helpings of pudding when Hermione started ushering them out of the Great Hall and off to Myrtle's bathroom to finish the potion.

"We still need a bit of whoever we're changing into," Hermione said. "Hairs will do, Ron, so don't go on at me about toenails again, please, I just ate. Anyway, Crabbe and Goyle will be the obvious targets, they rarely leave Malfoy's side for long. And you'll need larger robes, as they're enormous. I've already got spare ones for you."

"How are we going to keep the real Crabbe and Goyle from barging in? And get hairs from them?"

"I've already thought of that," she said, pulling out two chocolate cakes. "I've put a simple but effective sleeping draught in these. They're horrible gluttons, they're bound to eat them. Just put these where they can find them, and wait. Then you can hide them in a cupboard until you're done."

This potion was beginning to creep them out. Al pointed out that this was basically identity theft, and pointed out all the kinds of horrible things that could be done to someone's reputation with this. Harry ignored him, not wanting to think about it.

"What about you?" Ron asked.

"I've already got mine," Hermione said. "Milicent Bulstrode. Got these off her robes at the duelling club. I can just say I changed my mind about staying."

"Are those hairs long? They the same color as Milicent's hair?" Al asked, using Harry's body and voice.

"Yes. Why?"

"You're sure she doesn't have a cat? It's just, hair from her robes could be anyone, or anything with fur. And you said the potion was only for human transformations."

Hermione looked apprehensively at the hairs. "Um... I don't know. And I don't have any way of finding out; I don't know a spell to divine its source."

"Better safe than sorry, I'm thinking."

"Uh... yeah," she said, throwing the hairs away into the next stall. "Only now I don't know what I'm going to do."

"I could go up and get the invisibility cloak, you can hide under that."

She nodded. "Good thinking."

So Harry, careful not to be seen coming out of that loo, left and went back to his room. A few minutes later he came back with the cloak, handing it to Hermione. Then he and Ron went off with the cakes, looking for Crabbe and Goyle. They spotted them, setting the cakes down where the two would be lumbering past any moment, and hid to wait.

Sure enough, Crabbe and Goyle spotted the cakes and didn't even hesitate shoving them into their mouths. They swallowed without chewing, and immediately fell to the ground. Harry and Ron dragged their enormous bodies into a nearby wardrobe, glad that so few people meant they were unlikely to be caught at this. They grabbed the hairs, and the boys' shoes, their feet being enormous, then took off for Myrtle's bathroom again.

Hermione poured out two doses of the thick mud-like potion into tumblers, and once Hermione made sure she had everything right, each boy put the hair they'd taken into it. Goyle's bubbled and hissed and turned khaki color; Crabbe's turned a dark, murky brown.

"Ugh. Essence of Crabbe and Goyle."

Going into separate stalls because of the size change they'd be going through, they changed into the bigger robes, then pinched their noses and swallowed the foul-smelling mixture. Immediately, Harry's insides felt like writhing snakes, he doubled up in pain, and his whole body started to feel like it was burning. Then it melted, and bubbled, and he was growing alarmingly fast, his body thickening. He was glad he'd changed out of his shoes, Goyle's feet were like elephant feet. He got out of the stall and looked at himself in the cracked mirror, taking off his glasses as they were not needed, and gaped. Suddenly, the unidentified feelings felt much worse. He had recovered from the ill feeling the potion had given him, only to feel fresh waves of illness, and Wrongness, about every aspect of this body. It took every ounce of willpower he had to keep from smashing the mirror, puking, and crying. They didn't have the time for that, though.

Forcing himself to look over at Ron, who looked like a very bewildered Crabbe. Ron said a few expressions of horrified wonder at the effects of the potion. He barely noticed, as he was still fighting sickness.

"Are you okay, Harry?" Hermione asked him as she held the invisibility cloak in her hands, ready to go.

"I... I'll be okay. Just feel sick." Hearing Goyle's voice instead of his own, an experience he should be alright with given the collective's frequent transformations, just made his feeling of being sick get worse. He leaned against a wall to steady himself.

"Ugh... Let's... let's just get this over with. Ron, you ready?"

"What?" Crabbe's voice called. "Oh wait, gotta change into Crabbe's shoes."

Hermione got all but her head under the cloak, while Harry took some calming, bracing breaths. In less than a minute he and Ron were both ready. Hermione gave him one last unsure look.

"You sure you're okay? It could be a reaction to the potion, or an allergy."

"I'll be okay. Let's just go."

"Where is the Slytherin common room, anyway?" Ron asked.

"Zoey knows. And I know. Follow me."

After checking they wouldn't be seen exiting the bathroom, they left with an invisible Hermione at Harry's right side, Harry pointing which ways to turn as they came to them, and within 10 minutes they found the Slytherin common room. The only problem was, they didn't know the password.

They quietly debated what to do; there weren't enough students for them to just wait to follow someone in, as Zoey had done. They had no idea where Malfoy was, after all. Finally, though, they decided to try some likely passwords. They went through a full dozen of them before finding the right one – 'pure-blood.'

 _ **I am both unsurprised and surprised all at once,**_ Al thought.

 _Try to keep your emotions in check, everyone,_ Harry told the others. _The last thing we need is to transform in front of Malfoy._

That probably wouldn't be a problem, though; their magic felt dulled by either the potion or the sickness or the change.

Harry checked his watch; they were making good time. Now where was Malfoy?

"There you are," a familiar drawling voice said. "I've been looking all over the dorm for you two, I was about to head out to hunt for you. Were you two in the Great Hall all this time, pigging out?"

Not sure what to say, and not sure he could speak without feeling ill again, Harry grunted. This satisfied Malfoy, who apparently didn't expect Goyle to be very talkative. Come to think of it, neither Harry nor any of the others could remember either Crabbe or Goyle saying more than a couple words total.

"Whatever. Anyway, I'm glad you're here. Mother's sent me one last late Christmas present that she lost track of earlier, come look."

The gift Malfoy spoke of turned out to be a book called "Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy."

"Nice, isn't it? I know you two don't like reading, but I'm sure you'd get a kick out of some of these entries."

But the stuff he read to them was mostly very boring or confusing, or both. After a few minutes, Malfoy looked up and noticed they were bored.

"Ah, too high brow for you? No matter," he said, putting the book back, then relaxing in his chair. "What shall we talk about instead, then?"

Harry screwed up his courage and – making sure to look thoughtful first – said in Goyle's booming voice, "The Chamber of Secrets. Who d'ya reckon the next victim will be?"

"Ah, yes, that's always good value. Obviously I don't know, but I hope it'll be that mudblood Granger."

Crabbe's face suddenly looked furious as Ron bristled at these words. Harry surreptitiously stepped on his foot before he said something stupid.

"What's up with you, Crabbe?" Snapped Malfoy.

"Stomachache," Ron lied quickly.

"Well, go up to the hospital wing and give all those Mudbloods a kick from me," said Malfoy, snickering. "You know, I'm surprised the Daily Prophet hasn't reported all these attacks yet," he went on thoughtfully. "I suppose Dumbledore's trying to hush it all up. He'll be sacked if it doesn't stop soon. Father's always said old Dumbledore's the worst thing that's ever happened to this place. He loves Muggle-borns. A decent headmaster would never've let slime like that Creevey in."

Malfoy started taking pictures with an imaginary camera and did a cruel but accurate impression of Colin: " 'Potter, can I have your picture, Potter? Can I have your autograph? Can I lick your shoes, please, Potter?' "

Iliana felt a flash of fury, immediately followed by Zoey grabbing her and holding her down, preventing a transformation. Alastair also took over for Harry, because Harry kept his heart on his sleeve, and Al was better at hiding his emotions. But Malfoy dropped his hands and looked at Al and Ron.

"What's the _matter_ with you two?"

Far too late, Al and Ron forced themselves to laugh, but Malfoy seemed satisfied; perhaps Crabbe and Goyle were always slow on the uptake.

"Saint Potter, the Mudbloods' friend," said Malfoy slowly. "Bunch of freaks with no proper wizard feeling, or they wouldn't go around with that jumped-up Granger Mudblood. And people think _they're_ Slytherin's heir!"

 _ **My, my, but someone's got a ton of sour grapes,**_ Al thought with an unexpressed grin.

Ron and Al waited with bated breath. Malfoy seemed on the edge of admitting his guilt, which would've been news to Al.

"I _wish_ I knew who it _is_ ," said Malfoy petulantly. "I could help them."

Ron's jaw dropped so that Crabbe looked even more clueless than usual. Fortunately, Malfoy didn't notice, and Al, thinking fast, said, "Any ideas on who it might be?"

"You know I haven't, Goyle, how many times do I have to tell you?" snapped Malfoy. "And Father won't tell me _anything_ about the last time the Chamber was opened either. Of course, it was fifty years ago, so it was before his time, but he knows all about it, and he says that it was all kept quiet and it'll look suspicious if I know too much about it. But I know one thing — last time the Chamber of Secrets was opened, a Mudblood _died._ So I bet it's a matter of time before one of them's killed this time. … I hope it's Granger," he said with relish. Al thought this a little repetitive.

Ron was clenching Crabbe's gigantic fists. Feeling that it would be a bit of a giveaway if Ron punched Malfoy, Al glared at Ron and said, "D'you know if the person who opened the Chamber last time was caught?"

"Oh, yeah … whoever it was was expelled," said Malfoy. "They're probably still in Azkaban."

"Ah," Al said, forcing himself to chuckle. "Sucks to be them."

Barely noticing Al's comment, Malfoy shifted restlessly in his chair and said, "Father says to keep my head down and let the Heir of Slytherin get on with it. He says the school needs ridding of all the Mudblood filth, but not to get mixed up in it. Of course, he's got a lot on his plate at the moment. You know the Ministry of Magic raided our manor last week?"

Harry tried to force Goyle's dull face into a look of concern.

"Yeah …" said Malfoy. "Luckily, they didn't find much. Father's got some _very_ valuable Dark Arts stuff. But luckily, we've got our own secret chamber under the drawing-room floor —"

"Ho!" said Ron.

Malfoy looked at him. So did Al. Ron blushed.

"Just thought of something funny," Ron said, recovering. "D—Mr. Weasley, uh, sacked."

Malfoy laughed, almost a cackle.

"Good one, Crabbe."

Al looked at his watch while Malfoy was looking away. They had twenty minutes left.

"So nothing?" Al asked. "Not even some half-baked ideas about who it is?"

Malfoy sighed. "If only I did. If it's anyone in Slytherin, which it must be, I haven't seen anyone looking suspicious. Well, no more so than usual, I mean. You know how well Slytherins are at keeping secrets." He looked up at Al as though reconsidering his words. "Well, _most_ Slytherins, anyway. Honestly, a part of me is glad I don't know who it is; the only reason you two can keep secrets is you hardly ever talk. But that doesn't mean you might not still let something slip."

 _ **Okay guys,**_ Al asked the other members of the collective, _**is there any point continuing? I don't think he knows anything worth knowing.**_

 _Ask him if he knows anything about who died last time. Worth a shot._

"Do you know anything at all about the mudblood who died last time?" Al asked in Goyle's voice.

"No, Goyle, I don't. I don't see what it matters, anyway; it's not bloody likely to be anyone _we_ know, _obviously_."

His last word, 'obviously,' was so reminiscent of Snape's mannerisms whenever he made a word drip with derision that Al nearly grinned at the similarity.

"Honestly, Goyle, I've already told you everything I know. All you're doing now is making me annoyed. Whether I'm more annoyed with you for asking or at Father for not telling me anything, I don't know. Can we maybe talk about something less aggravating?"

Al checked the time again. Then made a decision, and clutched his stomach and moaned.

"What's wrong now, Goyle?"

"I think I ate one too many puddings. Gonna go to the hospital wing."

Catching on, Ron too moaned and clutched his stomach. "Me too. Sorry."

Malfoy, who was staring at the ceiling with one leg over the arm of his chair, waved vaguely at them. "Good. Spit on Creevy for me while you're there, won't you?"

As they walked back to the exit, Al hoped very much that Hermione was still following them. He worried about it until they were far enough away from Slytherin's common room that she whispered at him that she was there.

Once they were back in Myrtle's bathroom, they began to change back to themselves. Al slid away, leaving Harry in control again. The first thing he did was find a working toilet and vomit into it. He felt sweaty and feverish, but changing back to himself made him feel a lot better. Getting up, he flushed and staggered out of the stall.

"Blimey, Harry," Ron said. "You look more flushed than that toilet does."

"Har har," Harry said weakly.

With a muted glow, Harry disappeared and Iliana took his place.

"Poor lamb," she said of her headmate.

"Well, it wasn't a complete waste of time," Ron panted. "I know we still haven't found out who's doing the attacks, but I'm going to write to Dad tomorrow and tell him to check under the Malfoys' drawing room."

"And we know somebody died last time," Hermione added. "That's something, too."

"Later. We need to tie up loose ends," Iliana said.

So they did; Hermione flushed the rest of the potion down the toilet, Iliana changed into Harry's robes – which didn't fit her well, Ron changed back into his own robes, and they returned Crabbe's and Goyle's shoes to them in the wardrobe where they still dozed, stirring faintly like they'd wake soon. When they went back, Iliana and Ron took separate showers to wash the stink of Crabbe and Goyle off them.

As she showered, she found herself being very glad that the boys respected her enough to let her shower alone. Still, boys were often pigs, especially as they got older, so she didn't know how long this chivalry would last. She began to wonder if she should ask Dumbledore for access to the Prefects' bathrooms. She still didn't think switching to the girl's dorms, with two boys in the collective, was a good idea.

Freshly cleaned, Iliana went down to the common room and made to sit next to Hermione, but then noticed Ginny by the fire, looking anxious and ill. So she bypassed Hermione and sat next to Ginny instead.

"Hey Ginny. What's wrong? You look ill. And worried."

"What? Oh... it's... I think it's..." she trailed off, shrugging, and looking over at Hermione.

"Do you want to talk somewhere private?" Iliana asked.

Ginny looked thoughtful, but then Percy came down into the room, looking very pompous. Though apparently just passing through, Ginny gave a frightened squeal and took off back to her dorm.

 _ **Well that was odd. Wonder what she's worried about.**_

 _I was inclined to think she knew something about this Chamber business until Percy scared her off._

 _ **Why would that change your mind? She**_ _ **could**_ _ **know something.**_

 _I suppose. Though I can't think what it is. Unless she saw the Heir? Or a glimpse of the monster. I guess either/both of those things would make her worried. It would for me, too._

 _ **Well maybe you can wheedle something out of her later.**_

Iliana nodded vaguely, then got up and went back over to Hermione. The two girls were soon joined by Ron, and they spent hours talking about Malfoy's words and how they related to the Chamber.

When Iliana got back to her dorm, Aqua poked her head out.

 _'Where were you, human? I missed your warmth. The warm stone is adequate, but not the same as your soft, warm flesh.'_

Silently thankful that Ron was the only one in their dorm over the holidays, she answered, _'Sorry. I was hunting for information about the monster in the school and the one controlling it.'_

The snake shuddered before starting her slide up Iliana's arm. _'Yes, I can sense it sometimes. It is a great and terrible beast.'_

 _'Do you know anything about it?'_

 _'No more than what I just said. Sorry,'_ that last word said in a distinctly drowsy tone. Soon, Aqua was asleep, curled up around Iliana's arm.

Iliana changed into her nightgown and climbed into bed, thinking for over an hour before sleep took her.

Several weeks later, after all the students returned to Hogwarts, Harry was back, walking with Ron and Hermione and talking about nothing much when an angry outburst from the floor above reached their ears.

"That's Filch," Harry muttered as they hurried up the stairs and paused, out of sight, listening hard.

"You don't think someone else's been attacked?" said Ron tensely.

They stood still, their heads inclined toward Filch's voice, which sounded quite hysterical.

"— even more work for me! Mopping all night, like I haven't got enough to do! No, this is the final straw, I'm going to Dumbledore —"

His footsteps receded along the out-of-sight corridor and they heard a distant door slam.

They poked their heads around the corner. Filch had returned to his post by Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, and immediately saw the flood of water on the floor of the bathroom and half the corridor, which had to be what Filch was on about; and it looked as though it was still seeping from under the door of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Now that Filch had stopped shouting, they could hear Myrtle's wails echoing off the bathroom walls.

" _Now_ what's up with her?" said Ron.

"Let's go and see," said Harry, and holding their robes over their ankles they stepped through the great wash of water to the door bearing its OUT OF ORDER sign, ignored it as always, and entered. Harry knew he could have Vanished the water, but that would be pointless if the source wasn't turned off, first, so off they went to find the source.

The bathroom echoed painfully with Myrtle's horrible wailing; she was clearly very upset about something.

"What's wrong?" asked Harry.

"Don't ask me," Myrtle shouted, emerging with a wave of yet more water, which splashed onto the already sopping floor. "Here I am, minding my own business, and someone thinks it's funny to throw a book at me."

Harry paused. He didn't think it could hurt her physically, but it might set her off wailing more if he pointed this out. He glared at Ron, too, in case the tactless boy had the same thought. Ron looked back at Harry in confusion.

"Who threw it at you, anyway?" asked Harry.

" _I_ don't know. … I was just sitting in the U-bend, thinking about death, and it fell right through the top of my head," said Myrtle, glaring at them. "It's over there, it got washed out. …"

Harry and Ron looked under the sink where Myrtle was pointing. A small, thin book lay there. It had a shabby black cover and was as wet as everything else in the bathroom. He was about to pick it up when Alastair nearly had a fit in his head so loud that he covered his ears to try to block it out.

 _ **YEAH OKAY LET'S JUST TOUCH SOME UNKNOWN THING SOMEONE THREW AWAY WHEN THERE'S MONSTERS AND HEIRS OF SLYTHERIN LURKING ABOUT HURTING PEOPLE, BECAUSE THAT IS BOTH WISE AND CAUTIOUS, I THINK NOT!**_

 _SHUT UP, AL! I get the point!_

 _ **No I don't think you**_ _ **do**_ _ **get it. Remember the horrible books in the Restricted Section, like the screaming book? Magic can do all kinds of things, we have no idea how dangerous a book could be made to be. Besides, it gives me the creeps.**_

 _Okay okay._

"Good thinking, mate," Ron said when Harry drew back suddenly, not noticing Harry covering his ears in a fruitless attempt to drown out Al's voice. "That book could be cursed. Some of the books the Ministry's confiscated — Dad's told me — there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read _Sonnets of a Sorcerer_ spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives. And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could _never stop reading_! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed. And —"

"All right, I've got the point," said Harry, dropping his hands. "Honestly, you and Al both..."

The little book lay on the floor, nondescript and soggy.

" _Wingardium Leviosa,_ " Harry said with a swish and a flick of his wand. The little book floated up, and he concentrated on making it float toward them.

Very carefully, Hermione performed several spells, checking for things she wasn't explaining. Once she declared it a normal book as far as she could tell, she handed the soggy thing to Harry, who opened it. Neither of them died or got hurt touching it.

"It's a diary. T. M. Riddle."

"Hang on, I know that name," said Ron.

"How on Earth do you know that?"

"Because Filch made me polish his shield about fifty times in detention," said Ron resentfully. "That was the one I burped slugs all over. If you'd wiped slime off a name for an hour, you'd remember it, too."

Harry peeled the wet pages apart. They were completely blank. There wasn't the faintest trace of writing on any of them, not even _Auntie Mabel's birthday,_ or _dentist, half-past three._

"He never wrote in it," said Harry, disappointed.

"I wonder why someone wanted to flush it away?" said Ron curiously.

Harry turned to the back cover of the book and saw the printed name of a variety store on Vauxhall Road, London.

"He must've been Muggle-born," said Harry thoughtfully. "To have bought a diary from Vauxhall Road. …"

 _ **Or Muggle raised, like us,**_ Al pointed out.

"Well, it's not much use to you," said Ron. He dropped his voice. "You should toss it."

Harry, however, pocketed it.

The three of them continued talking about Riddle's diary when they got back to the common room. There, Hermione made the logical leap that if Riddle won a special award for services to the school 50 years ago, and the Chamber opened 50 years ago, it might be that Riddle knew something about the Chamber opening; that he may have even caught the Heir of Slytherin the first time. Though, as they pointed out to her, the one flaw in this hypothesis was that the diary appeared to be blank. Of course, Harry and company knew from their Christmas gift giving that there were ways to turn parchments into magical computers for storing text, so maybe the book was password protected. There weren't any colored tabs, and it was a Vauxhall Road purchase, but maybe Riddle was very clever and made his own magical diary.

Harry kept finding himself carrying the thing with him wherever he went, and took it out sometimes to look at it. He wanted to try to unlock the diary, but Al pointed out their going theory – substantiated by Dumbledore – that Voldemort was the Heir, and Draco had been told that the Heir had been caught and that he or she was in Azkaban. That suggested that Draco had been lied to, or his father mistaken, because Voldemort clearly had never been caught. Unless he'd broken out of Azkaban?

 _ **It also seems to me that people he'd gone to school with would recognize him when he came back. If they didn't recognize him, then that suggests he changed his appearance drastically.**_

 _I wonder if, when he's alive, he has that snakelike face we saw in Quirrell's skull?_ Harry asked.

 _ **Possibly. Which would explain why nobody recognized him. Anyway, my point is, for all we know, this Riddle could be Voldemort.**_

 _What?_

 _ **Well think about it. Isn't it a bit too much of a coincidence that this 50 year old diary happens to appear the same year that the Chamber opens again? I mean, I know it seems like an ordinary diary to Hermione, but as clever as she is, she's only a 2**_ _ **nd**_ _ **year student. It could be hiding powers that we can't detect.**_

 _Hmm... you have a point._

 _ **Also... and this is kind of a stretch, I know, but there haven't been any attacks while this thing was with us. I think we should hold onto it, in the trunk, and see if the attacks stop.**_

 _But if it is somehow responsible, would us holding onto it even help? Would it find a way to do its business anyway?_

 _ **Well**_ _,_ added Iliana, _**maybe we should test it anyway? If we're cautious, maybe we can get some information without activating it, if it is dangerous.**_

 _ **Hmm... maybe. I don't like it, but we don't actually know that it isn't just a blank diary, or a just a password protected magic diary.**_

 _How do we test it?_

They looked around. Too many people here. They could test it later.

They kept carrying it with them. Of all of them, only Al seemed to be able to resist picking it up on occasion and rifling through it, even though they all knew it was apparently blank. No spell, no magical Revealer, had yet given any indication that it was anything more than a blank diary. The only remarkable thing, so far, was the fact that it had dried without warping or growing mold on it. But that could be explained easily enough; Riddle could've cast _Impervious_ on it. It had been wet before, but not the way paper normally was wet; like the water was stuck to the pages, but didn't get absorbed into them.

Determined to find out more about the mysterious Riddle, they went to the trophy room to look at the trophy Ron had mentioned. It wasn't very big, and just had his name on it, and the words "Special award for services to the school." But they also found Riddle's name on an old medal for Magical Merit, and a list of old Head Boys.

"Sounds like Percy," Ron said. "Prefect, Head Boy … probably top of every class —"

"You say that like it's a bad thing," said Hermione in a slightly hurt voice.

"He's just jealous, Hermione. His brothers cast a long shadow."

If the collective thought the continued lack of attacks would get other people to stop treating them like a bomb about to go off, it didn't. It just made most of them more sure that he _was_ the Heir, that he'd given himself away at the Dueling Club.

One of these days, when Al was the one fully Out, he glared at some passing people who were looking weirdly at him.

 _'NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!'_ Al hissed at them in Parseltongue, making the shriek and skitter away.

"Al," Hermione said with a sigh.

"It's bloody insulting, it is," Al said, not bothering to keep his voice down, "the fact they think that, were I evil, I'd be so terrible at it as to reveal my secret to the whole school, and be found at the scene of the crime twice now. And we were in the bloody hospital having our damn bones regrown when Colin was attacked! I expect they think I dragged my agonized carcass past Madam Pomfrey, through the school past curfew without running into anyone, all the way to the Chamber – wherever the bloody hell that is – and around to find Colin to attack him in the midst of the agony of regrowing bones?

"Though the fact they think I somehow managed to attack Nick and Justin in the 30 seconds between leaving the library and running into Hagrid is interesting, I suppose. Glad to see they think I'm able to stretch time so 30 seconds becomes 30 minutes. I almost wish that were true; it would make getting schoolwork done in time a hell of a lot easier."

Gilderoy Lockhart seemed to think he himself had made the attacks stop. Al overheard him telling Professor McGonagall so while the Gryffindors were lining up for Transfiguration.

"I don't think there'll be any more trouble, Minerva," he said, tapping his nose knowingly and winking. "I think the Chamber has been locked for good this time. The culprit must have known it was only a matter of time before I caught him. Rather sensible to stop now, before I came down hard on him.

"You know, what the school needs now is a morale-booster. Wash away the memories of last term! I won't say any more just now, but I think I know just the thing. …"

He tapped his nose again and strode off.

"Gee, I can't wait to see what that monumental ass has planned. I'm sure I'm going to utterly loathe and detest it," Al said sarcastically.

Lockhart's idea of a morale-booster became clear at breakfast time on February fourteenth. Iliana hadn't had much sleep because of a late-running Quidditch practice the night before, and she hurried down to the Great Hall, slightly late. She thought, for a moment, that she'd walked through the wrong doors.

The walls were all covered with large, lurid pink flowers. Worse still, heart-shaped confetti was falling from the pale blue ceiling. Iliana went over to the Gryffindor table, a disgusted look on her face, where Ron was sitting looking equally sickened, and Hermione seemed to have been overcome with giggles.

"I don't know which of us is more disgusted; me, Al, or Harry. Zoey thinks it's great, of course. But she sometimes starts singing horrible annoying 80's songs when we're trying to get to sleep."

"What? I never hear her singing," Ron said.

"You wouldn't. She does it internally, so only we have to put up with it. Al has tried strangling her several times. Anyway, what's going on?" Iliana asked, wiping confetti off her bacon.

Ron pointed to the teachers' table, apparently too disgusted to speak. Lockhart, wearing lurid pink robes to match the decorations, was waving for silence. The teachers on either side of him were looking stony-faced. From where she sat, Iliana could see a muscle going in Professor McGonagall's cheek. Snape looked as though someone had just fed him a large beaker of Skele-Gro.

"Happy Valentine's Day!" Lockhart shouted. "And may I thank the forty-six people who have so far sent me cards! Yes, I have taken the liberty of arranging this little surprise for you all — and it doesn't end here!"

Lockhart clapped his hands and through the doors to the entrance hall marched a dozen surly-looking dwarfs. Not just any dwarfs, however. Lockhart had them all wearing golden wings and carrying harps.

"My friendly, card-carrying cupids!" beamed Lockhart. "They will be roving around the school today delivering your valentines! And the fun doesn't stop here! I'm sure my colleagues will want to enter into the spirit of the occasion! Why not ask Professor Snape to show you how to whip up a Love Potion! And while you're at it, Professor Flitwick knows more about Entrancing Enchantments than any wizard I've ever met, the sly old dog!"

Professor Flitwick buried his face in his hands. Snape was looking as though the first person to ask him for a Love Potion would be force-fed poison.

"Please, Hermione, tell me you weren't one of the forty-six," said Ron as they left the Great Hall for their first lesson. Hermione suddenly became very interested in searching her bag for her schedule and didn't answer.

"I've read about love potions," Iliana said. "I think they should be illegal. They're magically assisted rape, is what they are."

Hermione looked shocked, then thoughtful, then ill. She nodded silently.

"I can't take this. See you guys later," Iliana said. A short glow later, Harry appeared.

All day long, the dwarfs kept barging into their classes to deliver valentines, to the annoyance of the teachers, and late that afternoon as the Gryffindors were walking upstairs for Charms, one of the dwarfs caught up with Harry.

"Oy, you! 'Arry Potter!" shouted a particularly grim-looking dwarf, elbowing people out of the way to get to Harry.

Hot all over at the thought of being given a valentine in front of a line of first years, which happened to include Ginny Weasley, Harry tried to escape. The dwarf, however, cut his way through the crowd by kicking people's shins, and reached him before he'd gone two paces.

"I've got a musical message to deliver to 'Arry Potter in person," he said, twanging his harp in a threatening sort of way.

" _Not here,_ " Harry hissed in English, trying to escape.

" _Stay still_!" grunted the dwarf, grabbing hold of Harry's bag and pulling him back.

"Let me go!" Harry snarled, tugging.

With a loud ripping noise, his bag split in two. His books, wand, parchment, and quill spilled onto the floor and his ink bottle smashed over everything.

Harry scrambled around, trying to pick it all up before the dwarf started singing, causing something of a holdup in the corridor.

"What's going on here?" came the cold, drawling voice of Draco Malfoy. Harry started stuffing everything feverishly into his ripped bag, desperate to get away before Malfoy could hear his musical valentine.

"What's all this commotion?" said another familiar voice as Percy Weasley arrived.

Losing his head, Harry tried to make a run for it, but the dwarf seized him around the knees and brought him crashing to the floor.

"Right," he said, sitting on Harry's ankles. "Here is your singing valentine:

 _His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad,_

 _His hair is as dark as a blackboard._

 _I wish he was mine, he's really divine,_

 _The hero who conquered the Dark Lord._ "

Harry would have given all the gold in Gringotts to evaporate on the spot. Trying valiantly to laugh along with everyone else, he got up, his feet numb from the weight of the dwarf, as Percy Weasley did his best to disperse the crowd, some of whom were crying with mirth.

Harry was very glad Percy had helped, and used the opportunity to get away as quick as possible. He repaired his bag clumsily with _Reparo_ and shoved everything in. He could clean it all later.

"Off you go, off you go," Percy said. "The bell rang five minutes ago, off to class, now," he said, shooing some of the younger students away. " _And_ you, Malfoy —"

Harry, glancing over, saw Malfoy stoop and snatch up something. Leering, he showed it to Crabbe and Goyle, and Harry realized that he'd got Riddle's diary.

"Give that back," said Harry quietly.

"Wonder what Potter's written in this?" said Malfoy, who obviously hadn't noticed the year on the cover and thought he had Harry's own diary. A hush fell over the onlookers. Ginny was staring from the diary to Harry, looking terrified.

"Hand it over, Malfoy," said Percy sternly.

"When I've had a look," said Malfoy, waving the diary tauntingly at Harry.

Harry shot a curse at Malfoy that made the blonde's face erupt in painful hives, dropping the diary. Harry snatched it up and finished taking off.

"Harry!" said Percy loudly. "No magic in the corridors. I'll have to report this, you know!"

But Harry didn't care, he was one-up on Malfoy, and that was worth five points from Gryffindor any day. Malfoy was in pain, running through the corridor toward the hospital wing, Harry and Al looking forward to calling him Spot.

Ginny covered her face with her hands and ran into class, for some reason, though Harry barely noticed.

He grumbled and growled in a good imitation of Alastair all the way to Charms, when he was stopped cold by noticing that Riddle's diary was completely clean. This was different from how it reacted to water, so the collective made note of this. He tried to point this out to Ron, but Ron was having trouble with his wand again; large purple bubbles were blossoming out of the end, and he wasn't much interested in anything else.

They went to bed before anyone else did, mostly to avoid people singing the "Pickled Toad" song at them, but also to experiment with the diary. They dropped some droplets of ink on the page at first, and watched the ink get sucked away without leaving any mark on the page.

Then he tried writing in it, writing, "My name is Harry Potter."

The ink went away, and a different handwriting style appeared, with words saying " _Hello Harry Potter. My name is Tom Riddle. How did you come by my diary?_ "

Harry felt a surge of distrust and alarm from Al, but ignored it.

"Someone tried flushing it down a toilet," he wrote back.

" _Lucky that I recorded my memories in some more lasting way than ink. But I always knew that there would be those who would not want this diary read._ "

"What do you mean?" Harry scrawled.

" _I mean that this diary holds memories of terrible things. Things that were covered up. Things that happened at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry._ "

"That's where I am now," Harry wrote quickly. "I'm at Hogwarts, and horrible stuff's been happening. Do you know anything about the Chamber of Secrets?"

His heart was hammering. Riddle's reply came quickly, his writing becoming untidier, as though he was hurrying to tell all he knew.

" _Of course I know about the Chamber of Secrets. In my day, they told us it was a legend, that it did not exist. But this was a lie. In my fifth year, the Chamber was opened and the monster attacked several students, finally killing one. I caught the person who'd opened the Chamber and he was expelled. But the headmaster, Professor Dippet, ashamed that such a thing had happened at Hogwarts, forbade me to tell the truth. A story was given out that the girl had died in a freak accident. They gave me a nice, shiny, engraved trophy for my trouble and warned me to keep my mouth shut. But I knew it could happen again. The monster lived on, and the one who had the power to release it was not imprisoned._ "

Harry nearly upset his ink bottle in his hurry to write back.

"It's happening again now. There have been three attacks and no one seems to know who's behind them. Who was it last time?"

" _I can show you, if you like_ ," came Riddle's reply. " _You don't have to take my word for it. I can take you inside my memory of the night when I caught him._ "

Harry hesitated, his quill suspended over the diary. What did Riddle mean? How could he be taken inside somebody else's memory? Feeling even more alarm from Al, he glanced nervously at the door to the dormitory, which was growing dark. When he looked back at the diary, he saw fresh words forming.

" _Let me show you._ "

 _ **NO. I don't trust this thing! This is not like anything I've read or heard about, this is like it's... alive. It's creepy.**_

 _Come now, Al; it's probably just programmed to respond this way. Besides, we talk with portraits, they act alive. There are mirrors people use that talk back to their users. This is probably just like that._

 _ **I can't explain it beyond "Bad vibes," but this thing is dangerous.**_

 _Fine, fine._

"No thank you," Harry wrote back. "You can just tell me."

" _Harry, I perfectly understand your reluctance in these dark times,_ " Riddle wrote back, " _but seeing is believing, and the things I have to show you are hard to believe even when you see them. I promise you won't be hurt. It will take only minutes, and then you will be safely back to your chair. May I please show you?_ "

Harry hesitated. Al's alarm was diminishing a little into wariness. Riddle's politeness was what had clinched it for them; Voldemort had never been patient or polite in the one time they'd faced him. It seemed unlikely that this polite young man could be Voldemort.

"Well, since you asked nicely," Harry wrote back. "Okay."

The pages of the diary began to blow as though caught in a high wind, stopping halfway through the month of June. Mouth hanging open, Harry saw that the little square for June thirteenth seemed to have turned into a minuscule television screen. His hands trembling slightly, he raised the book to press his eye against the little window, and before he knew what was happening, he was tilting forward; the window was widening, he felt his body leave his bed, and he was pitched headfirst through the opening in the page, into a whirl of color and shadow.

He felt his feet hit solid ground, and stood, shaking, as the blurred shapes around him came suddenly into focus. Al's renewed alarm flooding him, he jumped up, pointing his wand around warily, expecting an attack.

He knew immediately where he was. This circular room with the sleeping portraits was Dumbledore's office — but it wasn't Dumbledore who was sitting behind the desk. A wizened, frail-looking wizard, bald except for a few wisps of white hair, was reading a letter by candlelight. Harry had never seen this man before. The portraits of former headmasters were largely the same, but everything else about the room was different; no Fawkes, no whirring silver instruments. This was not Dumbledore's office, even though it was the same room.

A quick succession of thoughts occurred within the collective, and in several seconds they realized that Riddle had somehow pulled them into his memory. Either that, or time travel. But since the unknown wizard hadn't noticed their sudden appearance, and didn't respond to them speaking, time travel seemed unlikely, if that were even possible.

There was a knock on the office door.

"Enter," said the old wizard in a feeble voice.

A boy of about sixteen entered, taking off his pointed hat. The collective analyzed him. A silver prefect's badge was glinting on his chest. He was much taller than Harry, but he, too, had jet-black hair. Iliana also noticed that he was extremely handsome. But Al noticed that his heart-reading ability wasn't working on Riddle. Though that could be explained if Riddle were nothing more than a magical memory with no soul. Al focused on his body language instead, the little subconscious tells people always give away.

"Ah, Riddle," said the headmaster.

"You wanted to see me, Professor Dippet?" said Riddle.

Riddle was nervous; Al saw that right away. That, too, was to be expected given what he'd said before, about the Chamber being open back then.

"Ah, Riddle," said the headmaster.

"You wanted to see me, Professor Dippet?" said Riddle. He looked nervous.

"Sit down," said Dippet. "I've just been reading the letter you sent me."

"Oh," said Riddle. He sat down, gripping his hands together very tightly.

"My dear boy," said Dippet kindly, "I cannot possibly let you stay at school over the summer. Surely you want to go home for the holidays?"

"No," said Riddle at once. "I'd much rather stay at Hogwarts than go back to that — to that —"

"You live in a Muggle orphanage during the holidays, I believe?" said Dippet curiously.

"Yes, sir," said Riddle, reddening slightly.

"You are Muggle-born?"

"Half-blood, sir," said Riddle. "Muggle father, witch mother."

"And are both your parents — ?"

"My mother died just after I was born, sir. They told me at the orphanage she lived just long enough to name me — Tom after my father, Marvolo after my grandfather."

Dippet clucked his tongue sympathetically. Al and Harry were sympathetic, too. Given his body language, this orphanage must've been at least as bad as the Dursleys. If that were true, no wonder he didn't want to go back. They themselves would rather stay behind, even with the Chamber still being open, than go back to the Dursleys, if that were still on the table.

"The thing is, Tom," he sighed, "special arrangements might have been made for you, but in the current circumstances. …"

"You mean all these attacks, sir?" said Riddle, and Harry's heart leapt, and he moved closer, scared of missing anything.

"Precisely," said the headmaster. "My dear boy, you must see how foolish it would be of me to allow you to remain at the castle when term ends. Particularly in light of the recent tragedy … the death of that poor little girl. … You will be safer by far at your orphanage. As a matter of fact, the Ministry of Magic is even now talking about closing the school. We are no nearer locating the — er — source of all this unpleasantness. …"

Riddle's eyes had widened.

"Sir — if the person was caught — if it all stopped —"

"What do you mean?" said Dippet with a squeak in his voice, sitting up in his chair. "Riddle, do you mean you know something about these attacks?"

"No, sir," said Riddle quickly.

 _ **Liar. He knows something. The fact that he isn't saying so means he either isn't sure of what he knows, or... well...**_

Dippet sank back, looking faintly disappointed.

"You may go, Tom. …"

Riddle slid off his chair and slouched out of the room. Harry followed him.

Down the moving spiral staircase they went, emerging next to the gargoyle in the darkening corridor. Riddle stopped, and so did Harry, watching him. Harry could tell that Riddle was doing some serious thinking. He was biting his lip, his forehead furrowed.

 _ **There's more than one possible explanation for that. He could be looking for a fall guy.**_

 _What makes you so sure he's guilty, Al? Anything beyond vibes?_

There was no answer.

Then, as though he had suddenly reached a decision, Riddle hurried off, Harry gliding noiselessly behind him. They didn't see another person until they reached the entrance hall, when a tall wizard with long, sweeping auburn hair and a beard called to Riddle from the marble staircase.

"What are you doing, wandering around this late, Tom?"

Harry gaped at the wizard. He was none other than a fifty-year-younger Dumbledore.

"I had to see the headmaster, sir," said Riddle.

"Well, hurry off to bed," said Dumbledore, giving Riddle exactly the kind of penetrating stare Harry knew so well. "Best not to roam the corridors these days. Not since …"

He sighed heavily, bade Riddle good night, and strode off. Riddle watched him walk out of sight and then, moving quickly, headed straight down the stone steps to the dungeons, with Harry in hot pursuit.

But there'd been more to that scene, that Al had noticed. Dumbledore was hard to read, even looking for tells, but it seemed to Al that Dumbledore didn't trust Riddle, like he was suspicious of the boy's motives, which seemed out of character for Dumbledore.

Then there was Riddle himself; though he tried to hide it, the small changes in his facial expression upon seeing Dumbledore said that the feeling was mutual. In fact, Riddle had a hard time disguising the fact that he hated Dumbledore. Al's wariness grew.

Riddle did not go down any secret passages, or anywhere particularly interesting. In fact, for what felt like the next hour, Riddle stood still as a stone pressed to the wall of the dungeon that led to Potions, waiting for something. The boy seemed almost to blend into the wall. Given what was supposed to be going on in the school, Al found it interesting that Riddle could hide for so long in the corridors without running into any of the teachers. Prefect or no, that was... interesting.

Finally, someone else appeared, skulking around the halls with equal caution but less skill. He followed Riddle as the prefect followed the other person, into a room with a creaking door.

"C'mon … gotta get yeh outta here. … C'mon now … in the box …"

There was something familiar about that voice. …

Riddle suddenly jumped around the corner. Harry stepped out behind him. He could see the dark outline of a huge boy who was crouching in front of an open door, a very large box next to it.

" 'Evening, Rubeus," said Riddle sharply.

The boy slammed the door shut and stood up. It was a much younger Hagrid. It was hard to tell without the beard, but it was Hagrid's same eyes, and nobody could mistake that hulking form; Hagrid was just as tall here as he was in Harry's time. Al had to resist laughing at the absurdity of this. Either Riddle was a total idiot, or he was spinning a tall tale for them. Al knew Hagrid was fond of monsters, but the thought he could be the Heir was just ludicrous.

"What yer doin' down here, Tom?"

Riddle stepped closer.

"It's all over," he said. "I'm going to have to turn you in, Rubeus. They're talking about closing Hogwarts if the attacks don't stop."

"What d'yeh —"

"I don't think you meant to kill anyone. But monsters don't make good pets. I suppose you just let it out for exercise and —"

"It never killed no one!" said the large boy, backing against the closed door. From behind him, Harry could hear a funny rustling and clicking.

"Come on, Rubeus," said Riddle, moving yet closer. "The dead girl's parents will be here tomorrow. The least Hogwarts can do is make sure that the thing that killed their daughter is slaughtered. …"

"It wasn't him!" roared the boy, his voice echoing in the dark passage. "He wouldn'! He never!"

"Stand aside," said Riddle, drawing out his wand.

His spell lit the corridor with a sudden flaming light. The door behind the large boy flew open with such force it knocked him into the wall opposite. And out of it came something that made Harry let out a long, piercing scream unheard by anyone —

A vast, low-slung, hairy body and a tangle of black legs; a gleam of many eyes and a pair of razor-sharp pincers — Riddle raised his wand again, but he was too late. The thing bowled him over as it scuttled away, tearing up the corridor and out of sight. Riddle scrambled to his feet, looking after it; he raised his wand, but the huge boy leapt on him, seized his wand, and threw him back down, yelling, "NOOOOOOO!"

The scene whirled, the darkness became complete; Harry felt himself falling and, with a crash, he landed spread-eagled on his four-poster in the Gryffindor dormitory, Riddle's diary lying open on his stomach.

Before he had had time to regain his breath, the dormitory door opened and Ron came in.

"There you are," he said.

Harry sat up. He was sweating and shaking.

"What's up?" said Ron, looking at him with concern.

"That's... that's complicated," Harry answered. "Let me tell you all about it."


	11. Return of the Return of the Heir

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 11"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Eleven: Return of the Return of the Heir

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. A bit more of it here than normal; one scene, I couldn't really improve upon or change.

Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of _**Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ and _Zoey_ , and now **_**Iliana (bold, italic, and underlined)**_** _ _ **.**__ __ _(_ Which is also sometimes used for emphasis in Al's speech, but whatever.)

After discussing it for a couple hours that night, and later with Hermione for several hours, they all came to the conclusion that it looked like Riddle's diary was somehow the cause of the Chamber opening. They came to this conclusion after what Al had told them about what he'd seen of the emotions of Dumbledore and Riddle. Since Dumbledore was famous for being the only person Voldemort ever feared, among other things, it seemed that handsome, prefect Riddle was Voldemort in his teen years. That, and the fact that Hagrid's monster had been a giant spider, not a snake.

But while they came to this conclusion, it was hard to believe, and even Al wasn't really sure. After all, what if Riddle had just been mistaken? Anyone who didn't know Hagrid well enough could logically conclude that he'd gone looking for the Chamber's monster. None of them thought Hagrid was the one who'd done it, but it was a logical conclusion, especially since the attacks had apparently stopped after that.

In the end, they decided to continue holding onto the diary. If it really was the cause of the problems, then the attacks should stop. Al even took extra measures to secure it, putting the diary in a locking box and that box inside his trunk, putting alarms and hexes on the box. Nothing major, since he didn't know many hexes, but it should cause anyone stealing it to break out in boils.

The second years were given something new to think about during their Easter holidays. The time had come to choose their subjects for the third year, a matter that Hermione, at least, took very seriously.

"It could affect our whole future," she told Harry and Ron as they pored over lists of new subjects, marking them with checks.

"I just want to give up Potions," said Harry.

"We can't," said Ron gloomily. "We keep all our old subjects, or I'd've ditched Defense Against the Dark Arts."

"But that's very important!" said Hermione, shocked.

"Not the way Lockhart teaches it," said Ron. "I haven't learned anything from him except not to set pixies loose."

"I wouldn't worry too much," Harry said. "I've heard rumors about that position; nobody ever lasts more than a year as DADA teacher in Hogwarts. We'll have someone new next year."

Which classes to take next year was a subject that had the entire Potter collective in hot discussions for days. There were lots of considerations, but Divination sounded good; they could certainly use the ability to read the future, with Voldemort as an enemy. Care of Magical Creatures also sounded useful. Arithmancy, from what they read, was a form of divination using the magical properties of numbers and numerology, but it sounded difficult. There was a lot to think about, so no conclusions came to them.

Gryffindor's next Quidditch match would be against Hufflepuff. Wood was insisting on team practices every night after dinner, so that Iliana was Out more often than Harry was, and only had time for Quidditch and schoolwork. But their practices were getting better and drier, so that made her happy.

But her cheerful mood didn't last long. At the top of the stairs to the dormitory, she met Neville Longbottom, who was looking frantic.

"Iliana — I don't know who did it — I just found —"

Watching Iliana fearfully, Neville pushed open the door.

The contents of their trunk had been thrown everywhere. Their cloak lay ripped on the floor. The bedclothes had been pulled off their four-poster and the drawer had been pulled out of their bedside cabinet, the contents strewn over the mattress.

Iliana walked over to the bed, open-mouthed, treading on a few loose pages of _Travels with Trolls._ As she and Neville pulled the blankets back onto his bed, Ron, Dean, and Seamus came in. Dean swore loudly.

"What happened?"

"No idea," she said. But she noticed all the pockets of the robes were hanging out. "Someone was looking for something."

"Is anything missing?"

It was hard to tell in all the mess. She set about repairing books and torn linens with her wand, and only when everything was put back right did she realize the box that had contained the diary was in pieces, like someone had blasted it with their wand. The diary itself was gone.

 _ **My guess is they blasted it open, the alarms went screeching, they grabbed the diary, and then blasted the box to stop it screeching.**_

Iliana nodded. She turned to Ron.

"Riddle's diary is gone."

They went out into the common room to tell Hermione. As she pointed out, only a Griffindor could have gotten into their dorm. This was not pleasant news. But Hermione was saying what Iliana and the others had been thinking.

The next morning, the conditions for Quidditch were perfect; the weather was fair, the sun was shining, and the breeze was warm but refreshing. Oliver Wood was excited, as was Iliana, despite their worries about Riddle's diary. In fact, this thought was preoccupying them as they looked up and down the Griffindor table, wondering who the thief was. And telling a teacher about it wasn't likely to be helpful; Dumbledore wasn't being cooperative, and that didn't bode well for the other teachers being any better. And there was Hagrid to think about; if the diary was found, it would finger Hagrid for the culprit, and given that Al didn't trust Riddle... it was just a lot to think about, and it was coloring their excitement.

As she left the Great Hall to collect her Quidditch things, their theory about the diary seemed to be confirmed as they heard that heart-stopping voice again.

" _Kill this time_ … _let me rip_ … _tear_ …"

She shouted aloud and Ron and Hermione both jumped away from her in alarm.

"That voice! I heard it again. And it's definitely Parseltongue! I recognize it now."

"Iliana, I've just thought of something," said Hermione suddenly. "I've got to go to the l-"

But Iliana grabbed Hermione like a shipwreck victim clutching a life raft, panic and tears in her eyes. "No you are not going anywhere with that thing on the loose, do you hear me? If I have to have Zoey turn you into a turtle and carry you in my pocket, I will not let you out of my sight until this whole Heir business is done, do you hear me?"

The rising pitch as panic gripped her voice made Hermione's eyes go wide.

"Alright, Iliana, I won't go any-"

"What could possibly be so important you have to leave our side now anyway?" Iliana demanded.

Hermione turned red and looked down at her shoes. "I, um... I was going to go to the library to ask Ms. Pince about magical snake creatures."

"Well it can wait! I barely knew Colin and I cried so much when he got petrified. And a girl died last time the Chamber was opened! I don't want that to be you this time!"

Hermione's eyes were also filling with tears. "I promise I'll stay by your side whenever we're out of our bedrooms."

"Not good enough. You're sleeping in my bed until this is over, understood? Don't give me that look, there's one girl in there already, two if you count Zoey, so what's another one?"

Nodding silently, Hermione followed Iliana and Ron up to their bedroom as Iliana got her Quidditch things, then followed them down to the Quidditch pitch.

"Can I go up to the bleachers with Ron," she asked tremulously as they approached the pitch, "or did you want me to stay with you in the changing room?"

"Well, I suppose it's okay. The Heir isn't likely to attack with all these witnesses."

"Good. Come on, Ron."

Despite what she'd said, Iliana didn't relax until she spotted the two of them in the crowd as she got on her broom. But just then, Professor McGonagall came out came half marching, half running across the pitch, carrying an enormous purple megaphone. Iliana's heart dropped like a rock.

"This match has been canceled," Professor McGonagall called through the megaphone, addressing the packed stadium. There were boos and shouts. Oliver Wood, looking devastated, landed and ran toward Professor McGonagall without getting off his broomstick.

"But, Professor!" he shouted. "We've got to play — the Cup — _Gryffindor_ —"

Professor McGonagall ignored him and continued to shout through her megaphone:

"All students are to make their way back to the House common rooms, where their Heads of Houses will give them further information. As quickly as you can, please!"

Then she lowered the megaphone and beckoned Iliana over. Iliana glared at McGonagall.

" _How_ can you think it's me this time? I've been with Ron and Hermione all morning, up until I went in to get changed for Quidditch, and one of the Weasley twins walked in on me nearly at the worst possible moment, so they can vouch for me."

Ron and Hermione came over just then.

"Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley, can you vouch for Potter's whereabout?"

The two basically repeated what Iliana had said. She then pulled the twins over and they, too, confirmed Iliana's alibi.

"Good. I really didn't think it was you, Potter, but given your tendency to be the first to discover attacks, I had to ask."

"I understand, Professor. Um... by the way, who was attacked?"

"It was another double attack. We found a miss Penelope Clearwater of Ravenclaw, and Ravenclaw's ghost, the Grey Lady. It looked as though the Grey Lady had just been floating past on her way somewhere, she didn't even look perturbed."

Hermione's eyes went wide at this, and she gave Iliana a Significant Look.

"Professor, would it be possible to stop by the library on the way back to our dorms?"

"No, Miss Granger, I'm afraid not. You can go to the library sometime later, perhaps, but not now."

They nodded in understanding.

The whole walk back to their dorms, Iliana clutched Ron's and Hermione's hands like she didn't want to ever let go of them. And when they got back, she actually followed Hermione up to the girl's dorms as she went to get some things to spend the next foreseeable nights in Iliana's bed. This was not well met by the other boys, until Iliana started to cry and shout at them at the same time in worry over her friends, at which point they relented.

"All students will return to their House common rooms by six o'clock in the evening," McGonagall had explained. "No student is to leave the dormitories after that time. You will be escorted to each lesson by a teacher. No student is to use the bathroom unaccompanied by a teacher. All further Quidditch training and matches are to be postponed. There will be no more evening activities."

The common room was full of scared people talking. Lee Jordan pointed out that none of the victims had been Slytherins. Even upset as she was, Iliana thought it unfair for him to want to chuck all the Slytherins out; they couldn't _all_ be bad, that was unrealistic.

Percy Weasley was sitting in a chair behind Lee, but for once he didn't seem keen to make his views heard. He was looking pale and stunned.

"Percy's in shock," George told the trio quietly. "That Ravenclaw girl — Penelope Clearwater — she's a prefect. I don't think he thought the monster would dare attack a _prefect._ "

But using their heart-reading and their skills at reading body language, Iliana didn't think that was it. Percy was plainly worrying about the well-being of someone he was in love with. But she didn't think it wise to tell the twins this. Or anyone else, lest the secret find them.

 _ **This whole business proves our theory right,**_ Al said, interrupting her thoughts. _**That diary is the source of all this madness. And if that's true, how did it get in here? And what do we do about it?**_

But, for once, nobody else in the collective had any ideas.

 _ **The only thing I think we can do,**_ Al finally thought, _**is get Hermione to the library so she can find out what this monster is. And then somehow figure out where the Chamber is?**_

"We have to talk to Hagrid," Iliana found herself saying. Though unexpected, the thought felt true.

"Why?"

"It's plain he didn't do this, but he was transporting that giant spider pet of his when he got 'caught.' It seemed agitated. I don't know why, but something about that tells me he might have a clue for us."

"Giant spider?" Hermione asked. "How giant?"

"Looked to be about the size where a toddler could ride it," Iliana said.

She turned to Ron, who was looking ill. "What's wrong with you?"

"I don't like spiders."

"You use them in potions," she pointed out.

"I don't mind them dead. The live ones, though... the way they move."

"A common fear."

Hermione nodded.

"Anyway, a spider that big suggests a baby acromantula."

"Spider that huge, and you reckon it's a _baby_?"

"Yes. Acromantulas can speak, they're intelligent. Maybe his spider knew what the creature was? Maybe it told him what the thing was?"

"So we definitely need to talk with Hagrid, then."

"But McGonagall said we've got to stay in our tower unless we're in class —"

"I think," said Iliana, more quietly still, "it's time to get dad's old cloak out again."

The Potters had inherited just one thing from their father: a long and silvery Invisibility Cloak. It was their only chance of sneaking out of the school to visit Hagrid without anyone knowing about it. They went to bed at the usual time, waited until Neville, Dean, and Seamus had stopped discussing the Chamber of Secrets and finally fallen asleep, then got up, dressed again, and threw the cloak over the three of themselves.

It was a tense trip. Unlike other night-time wanderings, this time there were dozens of teachers, ghosts, and prefects patrolling the halls, looking for suspicious activity. They were risking a lot more than house points this time, and breaking the promise Al had made to Dumbledore in the bargain, but this was important. What if the Heir took a friend next time? And what if that friend died? No, the stakes were too high.

It was a clear, starry night. They hurried toward the lit windows of Hagrid's house and pulled off the cloak only when they were right outside his front door.

Seconds after they had knocked, Hagrid flung it open. They found themselves face-to-face with him aiming a crossbow at them. Fang the boarhound barked loudly behind him.

"Oh," he said, lowering the weapon and staring at them. "What're you three doin' here?"

"What's that for?"

"Nothin' — nothin' — " Hagrid muttered. "I've bin expectin' — doesn' matter — Sit down — I'll make tea —"

He hardly seemed to know what he was doing. He nearly extinguished the fire, spilling water from the kettle on it, and then smashed the teapot with a nervous jerk of his massive hand.

"Are you okay, Hagrid?" said Iliana. "Did you hear about Penelope Clearwater?"

"Oh, is tha' her name? Yeh, I heard bout that, alright," he said with a slight break in his voice.

He kept glancing nervously at the windows. He poured them all large mugs of boiling water (he had forgotten to add tea bags) and was just putting a slab of fruitcake on a plate when there was a loud knock on the door.

Hagrid dropped the fruitcake. The three of them looked worriedly at each other, then hid under the cloak in a corner of the room. Once he was sure they were hidden, he got his crossbow out and answered the door.

"Good evening, Hagrid."

It was Dumbledore. He entered, looking deadly serious, and was followed by a second, very odd-looking man.

The stranger had rumpled gray hair and an anxious expression, and was wearing a strange mixture of clothes: a pinstriped suit, a scarlet tie, a long black cloak, and pointed purple boots. Under his arm he carried a lime-green bowler.

"That's Dad's boss!" Ron breathed. "Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic!"

Iliana and Hermione elbowed Ron hard to make him shut up.

Hagrid had gone pale and sweaty. He dropped into one of his chairs and looked from Dumbledore to Cornelius Fudge.

"Bad business, Hagrid," said Fudge in rather clipped tones. "Very bad business. Had to come. Three attacks on Muggle-borns, and two ghosts down to boot. Things've gone far enough. Ministry's got to act."

"I never," said Hagrid, looking imploringly at Dumbledore. "You know I never, Professor Dumbledore, sir —"

"I want it understood, Cornelius, that Hagrid has my full confidence," said Dumbledore, frowning at Fudge.

"Look, Albus," said Fudge, uncomfortably. "Hagrid's record's against him. Ministry's got to do something — the school governors have been in touch —"

"Yet again, Cornelius, I tell you that taking Hagrid away will not help in the slightest," said Dumbledore. His blue eyes were full of a fire none of the Potters had ever seen before.

"Look at it from my point of view," said Fudge, fidgeting with his bowler. "I'm under a lot of pressure. Got to be seen to be doing something. If it turns out it wasn't Hagrid, he'll be back and no more said. But I've got to take him. Got to. Wouldn't be doing my duty —"

"Take me?" said Hagrid, who was trembling. "Take me where?"

"For a short stretch only," said Fudge, not meeting Hagrid's eyes. "Not a punishment, Hagrid, more a precaution. If someone else is caught, you'll be let out with a full apology —"

"Not Azkaban?" croaked Hagrid.

Iliana struggled suddenly to prevent Tier growling. He did not like the idea of Hagrid going to that horrible place when he was innocent.

Before Fudge could answer, there was another loud rap on the door.

Dumbledore answered it, and this time Iliana got poked in the ribs, for she had recognized Lucius Malfoy. He was white-blond and would have been very handsome if not for the cold cruelty in his face. In that way, Draco took after his father.

"Already here, Fudge," he said approvingly. "Good, good …"

"What're you doin' here?" said Hagrid furiously. "Get outta my house!"

"My dear man, please believe me, I have no pleasure at all in being inside your — er — d'you call this a house?" said Lucius Malfoy, sneering as he looked around the small cabin. "I simply called at the school and was told that the headmaster was here."

"And what exactly did you want with me, Lucius?" said Dumbledore. He spoke politely, but the fire was still blazing in his blue eyes.

" _Dreadful_ thing, Dumbledore," said Malfoy lazily, taking out a long roll of parchment, "but the governors feel it's time for you to step aside. This is an Order of Suspension — you'll find all twelve signatures on it. I'm afraid we feel you're losing your touch. How many attacks have there been now? Two more this afternoon, wasn't it? At this rate, there'll be no Muggle-borns left at Hogwarts, and we all know what an _awful_ loss that would be to the school."

"Oh, now, see here, Lucius," said Fudge, looking alarmed, "Dumbledore suspended — no, no — last thing we want just now —"

"The appointment — or suspension — of the headmaster is a matter for the governors, Fudge," said Mr. Malfoy smoothly. "And as Dumbledore has failed to stop these attacks —"

"See here, Malfoy, if _Dumbledore_ can't stop them," said Fudge, whose upper lip was sweating now, "I mean to say, who _can_?"

"That remains to be seen," said Mr. Malfoy with a nasty smile. "But as all twelve of us have voted —"

Hagrid leapt to his feet, his shaggy black head grazing the ceiling.

"An' how many did yeh have ter threaten an' blackmail before they agreed, Malfoy, eh?" he roared.

 _ **Amen,**_ Al thought. _**I'm betting Lucius had something to do with this whole mess, he's one of Moldywart's followers, after all.**_

"Dear, dear, you know, that temper of yours will lead you into trouble one of these days, Hagrid," said Mr. Malfoy. "I would advise you not to shout at the Azkaban guards like that. They won't like it at all."

"Yeh can' take Dumbledore!" yelled Hagrid, making Fang the boarhound cower and whimper in his basket. "Take him away, an' the Muggle-borns won' stand a chance! There'll be killin' next!"

"Calm yourself, Hagrid," said Dumbledore sharply. He looked at Lucius Malfoy.

"If the governors want my removal, Lucius, I shall of course step aside —"

"But —" stuttered Fudge.

" _No_!" growled Hagrid.

Dumbledore had not taken his bright blue eyes off Lucius Malfoy's cold gray ones.

"However," said Dumbledore, speaking very slowly and clearly so that none of them could miss a word, "you will find that I will only _truly_ have left this school when none here are loyal to me. You will also find that help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it."

The man's eyes flicked in their direction. Did he know the three of them were there?

"Admirable sentiments," said Malfoy, bowing. "We shall all miss your — er — highly individual way of running things, Albus, and only hope that your successor will manage to prevent any — ah — _killins._ "

He strode to the cabin door, opened it, and bowed Dumbledore out. Fudge, fiddling with his bowler, waited for Hagrid to go ahead of him, but Hagrid stood his ground, took a deep breath, and said carefully, "If anyone wanted ter find out some _stuff,_ all they'd have ter do would be ter follow the _spiders._ That'd lead 'em right! That's all I'm sayin'."

Fudge stared at him in amazement.

"All right, I'm comin'," said Hagrid, pulling on his moleskin overcoat. But as he was about to follow Fudge through the door, he stopped again and said loudly, "An' someone'll need ter feed Fang while I'm away."

The door closed, and they removed the invisibility cloak.

"We're in trouble now," Ron said hoarsely. "No Dumbledore. They might as well close the school tonight. There'll be an attack a day with him gone."

Fang started howling, scratching at the closed door.

Hagrid's advice turned out to be really hard to follow, and getting into the library was proving just as hard. So days creeped by, until one day the three of them spotted some spiders in Herbology. The many-legged critters appeared to be heading for the Forbidden Forest, filling the Potters with dread and foreboding, even though it made perfect sense. If there really was an acromantula in that dark forest, then they might be going into a trap. But they had to find out. And given that nobody was likely to be patrolling the forest, it would be easier to get into than the library, these days.

It was Al they were transformed into during that class, and he was not pleased to run into Ernie MacMillan while holding a bunch of shrivelfigs in his arms.

"What do you want?" he asked, not bothering to try to sound polite.

Ernie, though, looked abashed. "It's just... I spoke with Penelope before she was attacked; I saw you, Ron, and Hermione leave the building for the Quidditch pitch as I did, and then she went off to the library. I was going to watch the game, so I saw Iliana go into the changing room. What I'm trying to say is, I was wrong about you. I apologize for the things I said about you."

"Your apology is heard. As to whether it will be accepted... I'll get back to you on that."

Ernie winced. "Fair enough."

As the four of them worked on their shrivelfigs together, Ernie talked more.

"That Draco Malfoy character," said Ernie, breaking off dead twigs, "he seems very pleased about all this, doesn't he? D'you know, I think _he_ might be Slytherin's heir."

"That's clever of you," said Ron.

"Do you think it's Malfoy, Al?" Ernie asked.

"No," said Al, so firmly that Ernie and Hannah stared.

"Whoever it is has shown a desire for secrecy; they haven't been caught yet. Malfoy is way too excited about this business, makes him way too obvious a candidate. And if it _were_ him, he wouldn't be subtle about it. He'd be bragging, and he would have been caught early on."

This seemed to convince them; they looked thoughtful, and nodded.

It was then that they saw the spiders, and surreptitiously had a conversation about them, deciding they would have to go into the forest.

At the end of the lesson Professor Sprout escorted the class to their Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson. Al, Ron, and Hermione lagged behind the others so they could talk out of earshot, and plan their trip. Ron was reluctant, but Al asking him "What if it had been Hermione?" made him decide to tag along.

But plans aside, they still had classes to go to, and the next was Lockhart's. The idiot was the only cheerful person in the castle, as he was absolutely convinced that Hagrid had been the culprit. Al tried to resist the urge to say something, but finally he snorted so loudly that Lockhart said, "Yes, Mr. Potter? You doubt the culprit's been caught?"

Al tried to think of a defense of Hagrid that he could possibly know were he a normal person with a normal life, rather than someone who kept getting caught up in the middle of things like this, and couldn't think of a single thing.

"I can't explain it, I just know Hagrid's innocent," he finally said. Then unfocused his eyes as he tried to ignore the resulting tide of Pompous Blowhard streaming from Lockhart.

Not wanting to waste time, the trio decided to go to the Forest that very night.

The Gryffindor common room was always very crowded these days, because from six o'clock onward the Gryffindors had nowhere else to go. They also had plenty to talk about, with the result that the common room often didn't empty until past midnight.

Al went to get the Invisibility Cloak out of their trunk right after dinner, and spent the evening sitting on it, waiting for the room to clear. Fred and George challenged Al and Ron to a game of Exploding Snap, but they declined; Hermione had given them a list of spells to practice for their plan, and they practiced these as quietly as possible on a bunch of old Butterbeer bottles they'd gotten from the twins, as Hermione sat reading about magical monsters and taking notes, and Ginny sat watching Ron and Al, very subdued for some reason. All told, it was well past midnight when Fred, George, and Ginny finally went to bed.

Once they were certain they were alone, the three of them put on the cloak. Though Al immediately took it off again, handed it to Hermione, and shrunk down with barely a glimmer of light to Harry, who was much shorter; Al had felt this would be easier.

"Right," Hermione said. "You've memorized those spells I gave you? Good, let's go now."

They put on the cloak at last, and left the common room together.

It was another difficult journey through the castle, dodging all the teachers and prefects. But at last they reached the entrance hall, slid back the lock on the oak front doors, squeezed between them, trying to stop any creaking, and stepped out into the moonlit grounds.

" 'Course," said Ron abruptly as they strode across the black grass, "we might get to the forest and find there's nothing to follow. Those spiders might not've been going there at all. I know it looked like they were moving in that sort of general direction, but …"

His voice trailed away hopefully.

When the three of them got to Hagrid's house, they were greeted by Fang. To prevent his barks alerting the teachers, they cemented his jaw shut with some treacle toffee. They also left the cloak behind at Hagrid's, as they wouldn't need it in the forest. But they did take Fang, who might be useful.

Harry and Hermione lit their wands once they got into the forest. Ron would've done his, but they didn't need any explosions. In all the bother about the Chamber, Harry realized they'd quite forgotten about getting Ron a new wand. But now wasn't the time either.

Harry tapped Ron and Hermione on the shoulder, pointing at the grass. Two solitary spiders were hurrying away from the wandlight into the shade of the trees.

"Okay," Ron sighed as though resigned to the worst, "I'm ready. Let's go."

"Me too," said Hermione.

So the three humans (or 7, depending on your point of view) and one dog set out, Harry's and Hermione's wands lighting the way, Hermione getting as nervous as Ron.

"Oh, I don't know about this," she said, the deeper in they got, until they could no longer see the stars. "Maybe we should have gone to the library instead."

"And have Filch catch all three of us? No thanks," Harry said.

"Yes, but acromantulas eat people, Harry."

Ron gagged. "You're only telling us this NOW?"

"Oh, sorry," she said worriedly. "It's just... the acromantula Hagrid had in that box would be near the end of its life, and I thought maybe we'd be safe from one slow, dying giant spider. But now we're in here in the dark, following these spiders, and I have to wonder if Hagrid didn't maybe... get him a mate."

Ron turned so pale he could pass for a vampire. He opened his mouth to speak, but didn't seem able. Harry spoke instead.

"I _really_ hope Hagrid isn't that naïve."

 _ **Maybe Hagrid's pet acromantula was a pouf,**_ Al thought hopefully.

 _I wouldn't bet on it,_ Harry replied.

It got more and more difficult to find the spiders the deeper in they went, as the darkness turned into almost a solid thing, making their 'lumos' spells seem feeble and wan. Time was becoming hard to judge, but they must have followed the trail for at least half an hour before they finally lost the trail.

"Okay, let's keep looking, they're bound to be around here somewhere."

It was a few moments before Harry realized that only Hermione had responded, by looking with him. He looked over at Ron, who was looking up and behind Harry, with a look of mute horror on his face.

Harry didn't even have time to turn around. There was a loud clicking noise and suddenly he felt something long and hairy seize him around the middle and lift him off the ground, so that he was hanging facedown. He heard Hermione scream. Struggling, terrified, he heard more clicking, and saw Ron's legs leave the ground, too, heard Fang whimpering and howling — next moment, he was being swept away into the dark trees.

Head hanging, Harry saw that what had hold of him was marching on six immensely long, hairy legs, the front two clutching him tightly below a pair of shining black pincers. Behind him, he could hear another pair of the creatures, no doubt carrying Ron and Hermione. They were moving into the very heart of the forest. Harry could hear Fang fighting to free himself from a fourth monster, whining loudly, but Harry couldn't have yelled even if he had wanted to; he seemed to have left his voice back in the clearing where they'd lost the trail.

He never knew how long he was in the creature's clutches; he only knew that the darkness suddenly lifted enough for him to see that the leaf-strewn ground was now swarming with spiders. Craning his neck sideways, he realized that they had reached the ridge of a vast hollow, a hollow that had been cleared of trees, so that the stars shone brightly onto the worst scene he had ever laid eyes on.

Spiders. Not tiny spiders like those surging over the leaves below. Spiders the size of carthorses, eight-eyed, eight-legged, black, hairy, gigantic. The massive specimen that was carrying Harry made its way down the steep slope toward a misty, domed web in the very center of the hollow, while its fellows closed in all around it, clicking their pincers excitedly at the sight of its load.

Harry fell to the ground on all fours, and heard Ron and Hermione land, too. Ron's face was a rictus of terror, and Hermione's face was little better. Ron looked exactly like Harry felt. His mouth was stretched wide in a kind of silent scream and his eyes were popping.

Harry suddenly realized that the spider that had dropped him was saying something. It had been hard to tell, because he clicked his pincers with every word he spoke.

"Aragog!" it called. "Aragog!"

And from the middle of the misty, domed web, a spider the size of a small elephant emerged, very slowly. There was gray in the black of his body and legs, and each of the eyes on his ugly, pincered head was milky white. He was blind.

"What is it?" he said, clicking his pincers rapidly.

"Men," clicked the spider who had caught Harry.

"Is it Hagrid?" said Aragog, moving closer, his eight milky eyes wandering vaguely.

"Strangers," clicked the spider who had brought Ron.

"Kill them," clicked Aragog fretfully. "I was sleeping. …"

"We're friends of Hagrid's," Harry shouted. His heart seemed to have left his chest to pound in his throat.

 _Click, click, click_ went the pincers of the spiders all around the hollow.

Aragog paused.

"Hagrid has never sent men into our hollow before," he said slowly.

"Hagrid's in trouble," said Harry, breathing very fast. "That's why we've come."

"In trouble?" said the aged spider, and Harry thought he heard concern beneath the clicking pincers. "But why has he sent you?"

Harry thought of getting to his feet but decided against it; he didn't think his legs would support him. So he spoke from the ground, as calmly as he could.

"They think, up at the school, that Hagrid's been setting a — a — something on students. They've taken him to Azkaban."

Aragog clicked his pincers furiously, and all around the hollow the sound was echoed by the crowd of spiders; it was like applause, except applause didn't usually make Harry feel sick with fear.

"But that was years ago," said Aragog fretfully. "Years and years ago. I remember it well. That's why they made him leave the school. They believed that _I_ was the monster that dwells in what they call the Chamber of Secrets. They thought that Hagrid had opened the Chamber and set me free."

"Yes, I know about that. I also don't think you were the creature from the Chamber."

"Of course I wasn't!" said Aragog, clicking angrily. "I was not born in the castle. I come from a distant land. A traveler gave me to Hagrid when I was an egg. Hagrid was only a boy, but he cared for me, hidden in a cupboard in the castle, feeding me on scraps from the table. Hagrid is my good friend, and a good man. When I was discovered, and blamed for the death of a girl, he protected me. I have lived here in the forest ever since, where Hagrid still visits me. He even found me a wife, Mosag, and you see how our family has grown, all through Hagrid's goodness. …"

Harry summoned what remained of his courage.

"So I'm right then, you never attacked anyone?"

"Never," croaked the old spider. "It would have been my instinct, but out of respect for Hagrid, I never harmed a human. The body of the girl who was killed was discovered in a bathroom. I never saw any part of the castle but the cupboard in which I grew up. Our kind like the dark and the quiet. …"

"But then … Do you know what _did_ kill that girl?" said Harry. "Because whatever it is, it's back and attacking people again —"

His words were drowned by a loud outbreak of clicking and the rustling of many long legs shifting angrily; large black shapes shifted all around him.

"The thing that lives in the castle," said Aragog, "is an ancient creature we spiders fear above all others. Well do I remember how I pleaded with Hagrid to let me go, when I sensed the beast moving about the school."

"What is it?" said Harry urgently.

More loud clicking, more rustling; the spiders seemed to be closing in.

"We do not speak of it!" said Aragog fiercely. "We do not name it! I never even told Hagrid the name of that dread creature, though he asked me, many times."

"It wouldn't happen to be a snake of some kind?" Harry asked.

More of that loud clicking and rustling.

"Yes, it is. A serpent of enormous size and power," said Aragog. "And that is all I will say on the matter. Even that may be too much."

Looking around at the creeping acromantulas, Harry silently gulped. "Well thank you for the information. We'll be going now, so we can help get Hagrid free."

"Go? I think not. My sons and daughters do not harm Hagrid on my command. But I cannot deny them fresh meat when it wanders so willingly into our midst, even on the promise of helping Hagrid. Goodbye, friends of Hagrid."

"Do we panic _now_?" Ron croaked out feebly.

"Harry," Hermione said, her voice shrill with fear. "Acromantulas don't like light."

"Yes, he said that. I don't... Oh."

As the giant spiders closed in on them, Harry realized that Tier had been chomping at the bit to be let loose, and so he let down the barriers keeping him back. His friends closed their eyes just in time for the brightest flash of light their transformations had ever made, making the giant spiders hiss and click in pain as Tier made some truly interesting changes to their shared body. When the light stopped, Tier grabbed Hermione, Ron, and Fang and carried them on his back. The animal-like Tier had become a very large creature indeed, looking like a mutated, sloppily-created hybrid of a human, a wolf, and a dragon, though he was not even as big as the acromantulas. It looked mostly like a giant wolf, if it had mange, and a dragonish head and tail.

Tier blew flames at the spiders, lighting their dome-shaped web on fire and eliciting screams from them, then tore ass as fast as he could back toward Hogwarts on wolf-like legs, dodging most of the trees, but letting branches and some saplings and bushes get shoved aside or broken off by his force-field.

The spiders were following him at quite a clip. Hermione and Ron shot spells at them, and every now and then Tier turned his head back to shoot flames at them, setting some of them on flames, the giant spiders screaming inhumanly, something sure to haunt their nightmares. But mostly, he had to focus on where he was going, to avoid the larger trees that wouldn't yield to his magical shield.

After several close calls, they started into the less dense areas of the forest, and the acromantulas started shying away from the light. But Tier didn't slow down. Instead, he burst out of the forest altogether, and seemed to be heading right for the castle when something made him stop so suddenly that his passengers almost fell off, turning just as quickly and slamming himself through Hagrid's front door. Ron and Hermione and Fang tumbled off, and Tier huddled, shaking, under Hagrid's bed with Fang.

The other two didn't look much better. Ron puked in the same pail he'd been coughing slugs into, and Hermione looked about ready to blow, too.

However, the fear seemed to be so bad for Tier that he couldn't cope anymore. With a flash of light, Tier became Harry again.

"Follow the spiders," said Ron weakly, wiping his mouth on his sleeve as Harry crawled out from under the bed. "I'll never forgive Hagrid. We're lucky to be alive."

"I bet he thought Aragog wouldn't hurt friends of his," said Harry.

"That's exactly Hagrid's problem!" said Ron, thumping the wall of the cabin. "He always thinks monsters aren't as bad as they're made out, and look where it's got him! A cell in Azkaban!" He was shivering uncontrollably now. "What was the point of sending us in there? What have we found out, I'd like to know?"

Harry turned to Hermione, who had her chin on her knees.

"Well," Harry said. "We've confirmed it's a snake monster. And we found out where exactly the girl who died was discovered; a bathroom."

Ron snorted. Plainly this wasn't good enough for him.

Once they were recovered enough, the three of them got back under the invisibility cloak and headed back to the castle and up to Harry and Ron's bedroom. To make things less awkward, Harry had Zoey bring Iliana Out, and as soon as Ron closed his bed's curtains, the two girls got changed into nightgowns, then crawled into bed together.

Neither of the girls could sleep. They were both too scared and recovering from the adrenaline, and the collective's shared mind was buzzing with what they'd learned.

It was only when she finally started to feel drowsy that she realized it. Turning to Hermione, finding the other girl awake still, she got her friend's attention.

"Hermione. That girl who died. Aragog said she was found in a bathroom. What if she never left?"

Hermione's eyes went wide. "Moaning Myrtle?"

"Exactly my thoughts."

End note: No, I do not have any plans to ship Iliana and Hermione together. Iliana, like Harry does both here and in the canon material, thinks of Hermione as a sister. That, and Rowling's other reasons for not shipping Harry and Hermione, makes too much sense to me to change. I can also assure you that the reasons are not because of any heterosexuality on Iliana's part. (I'm already fairly certain she's bisexual, though we shall see; when I write, my characters tend to surprise me sometimes.)


	12. Into the Chamber of Secrets

**"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 12"**

 **By = Fayanora**

 **Chapter Twelve: Into the Chamber of Secrets**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of _**Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ and _Zoey_ , and now **_**Iliana (bold, italic, and underlined)**_** _ _ **.**__ _(_ Which is also sometimes used for emphasis in Al's speech, but whatever.)

All those times we were in that bathroom, and she was just three toilets away," said Ron bitterly at breakfast next day, "and we could've asked her, and now we can't."

At that moment, Percy Weasley came up to Hermione.

"Ah, there you are, Hermione. Your dorm mates were worried about you last night, where were you?" he asked her grumpily.

"She was with me," Iliana explained. "I've been so scared about this whole Heir business, I had her sleep with me in my bed."

Percy's face contorted with discomfort and haughtiness, a very odd combination; she guessed he was disapproving for multiple reasons.

"I don't know, Iliana," he said. "My mother is hardly comfortable with you and Zoey in a boy's dormitory, and now Hermione, too? It just doesn't seem right."

"Oh come on, Percy. It's just until this Chamber business finishes, if it ever does. Did you know she almost ran off to the library on her own the day Penelope and the Grey Lady got attacked? It could've been her in there now, and I don't know if I could function if she got attacked. I feel better when she's where I can keep an eye on her, during all this bad business. Please, Percy?"

Percy looked shaken, and his eyes were watering as though he was about to cry. Which made sense if Penelope and him were dating.

"Y-yes. Yes, Iliana, I'll just tell McGonagall and the Griffindor girls what's going on. I... well, it might be difficult to convince McGonagall, but I'll try my hardest, okay?"

Iliana smiled at him.

"Thanks, Percy!"

It had been hard enough trying to look for spiders. Escaping their teachers long enough to sneak into a girls' bathroom, the girls' bathroom, moreover, right next to the scene of the first attack, was going to be almost impossible. Not even Hermione, Iliana, or Zoey could have managed it in the current climate.

Then McGonagall dropped a bombshell on them, by talking about exams. Everyone, except for Hermione, was flabbergasted at this; none of them had thought there would be any exams with this whole Chamber business.

"Can you picture me taking exams with this?" Ron asked, his wand now whistling loudly. Iliana wished there were a way to get her friend a new wand.

Before they could leave class, McGonagall held Iliana back to talk with her.

"Yes, Professor?" she asked.

"Young Percy Weasley spoke to me earlier about Miss Granger staying at your dorm during all this trouble. And while I agree that Miss Granger does need someone with horse sense to keep her safe during all this bother, I don't know if I'm comfortable with _two_ girls – or, well, I suppose three girls, what with Zoey Potter – spending time in a boy's dormitory. Especially Miss Granger, whose form doesn't change like yours does."

"I understand the concerns you and other adults have, but besides the fact that I trust the boys in my dorm, I also know a number of spells to keep them out of the bed while we're in it. You know, stuff like using _duro_ on the curtains to make them solid, and intruder repelling charms."

McGonagall looked pensive.

"Well yes, that sounds good, Miss Potter. But what about changing? Where do you and Miss Granger get changed?"

"In the bed, with the curtains closed and solidified. Or we lock the door when nobody else is in the room, and unlock it when we're done."

"And, um... what about the, uh... the boys you share a body with."

Iliana turned red.

"They hide and don't look. And it's not like Hermione and I are watching each other get dressed. We're usually doing something else when the other is changing."

Still, the Professor looked like she was debating with herself as to whether or not to ask something else.

"I'm not how to put this next thing, Miss Potter, but... well... we give all the students their own beds for multiple reasons. I don't know how things are in the Muggle world, but here in our world, relationships of a... romantic sort, between individuals of the same sex... are accepted as a thing that happens sometimes. So we don't exactly encourage students to sleep in each other's beds even when they're the same sex."

Iliana's face was almost as red as her hair now.

"Hermione's just like a sister to me. That's all, really. Besides, I like boys. Like Oliver Wood."

McGonagall, for her part, looked almost as uncomfortable as Iliana did.

"Understood, Miss Potter. Well, I'll allow it because of these attacks, but you're both to go back to your normal accomidations after it's been taken care of, understood?"

Iliana nodded.

"Good. Oh, and prepare yourselves; you may need to defend yourselves against accusations of impropriety by other students. And they might not be as... gentle... as I've been."

"Understood, Professor. We will."

McGonagall dismissed her with a curt nod and a wave, and Iliana left, trying to keep her face from catching on fire.

More good news came three days before the exams, when McGonagall announced that the mandrakes were ready for cutting, and the restorative draught was thus almost ready. Surely the culprit would be found out as soon as Colin and the others woke up. Iliana's eyes watered in silent tears of joy at this news.

"It won't matter that we never asked Myrtle, then!" Ron said to Iliana.

Just then, Ginny Weasley came over and sat down next to Ron. She looked tense and nervous, and Harry noticed that her hands were twisting in her lap.

"What's up?" said Ron, helping himself to more porridge.

Ginny didn't say anything, but glanced up and down the Gryffindor table with a scared look on her face that reminded Iliana of someone, though he couldn't think who.

"Spit it out," said Ron, watching her.

Iliana suddenly realized who Ginny looked like. She was rocking backward and forward slightly in her chair, exactly like Dobby did when he was teetering on the edge of revealing forbidden information.

"I've got to tell you something," Ginny mumbled, carefully not looking at Iliana.

"What is it?" said Iliana.

Ginny looked as though she couldn't find the right words.

" _What_?" said Ron.

Ginny opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Harry leaned forward and spoke quietly, so that only Ginny and Ron could hear him.

"Is it something about the Chamber of Secrets? Have you seen something? Someone acting oddly?"

Ginny drew a deep breath and, at that precise moment, Percy Weasley appeared, looking tired and wan.

"If you've finished eating, I'll take that seat, Ginny. I'm starving, I've only just come off patrol duty."

Ginny jumped up as though her chair had just been electrified, gave Percy a fleeting, frightened look, and scampered away. Percy sat down and grabbed a mug from the center of the table.

"Percy!" said Ron angrily. "She was just about to tell us something important!"

Halfway through a gulp of tea, Percy choked.

"What sort of thing?" he said, coughing.

"I just asked her if she'd seen anything odd, and she started to say —"

"Oh — that — that's nothing to do with the Chamber of Secrets," said Percy at once.

"How do you know?" said Ron, his eyebrows raised.

"This wouldn't have anything to do with your girlfriend, would it?" Iliana asked, making Ron stare at her with just as much bewilderment as Percy, before Percy responded.

"I, what? Me, a girlfriend? No, seriously?"

"You just interrupted Ginny saying something possibly important because of something to do with your girlfriend?" Ron finally managed to splutter.

Percy's face turned very red, and he walked very fast away from them. Iliana frowned.

"Come on, let's go find your sister, see if we can convince her to talk."

"Oh cummon, Iliana, what could she have seen? She probably just walked in on Percy and his girlfriend kissing. Who's his girlfriend, anyway?"

"I don't know, but I'm not going to just dismiss this as silliness without hearing her out first. It isn't the first time she's tried talking to us."

It wasn't exactly easy to get a private word with Ginny anywhere, though, with all that had been going on, and she wasn't making it any easier. In fact, Iliana found it very odd that she had somehow managed to vanish from a crowded room when all the teachers and prefects were still on high alert. It was faintly worrisome, but after asking around a bit, she found out Ginny had gone with some other people back to the common room, which made her relax. Maybe Ron was right; maybe she _had_ just seen Percy kissing Penelope.

Then, for no apparent reason they could figure out, they spontaneously transformed from Iliana to Harry. Harry was glad it hadn't happened sooner, or it might've scared Ginny off.

Harry knew the whole mystery might be solved tomorrow without their help, but the mystery nagged at him, and he knew Hermione was pulling on her hair some days with frustration at not knowing the answer. It seemed like they'd have to find out along with everyone else. Or it would have, if Hermione hadn't gotten so frustrated one afternoon with her studying that she begged McGonagall to let her, Ron, and Harry into the library.

"Well, yes Miss Granger, you raise a good point. Griffindors!" she announced to the common room. "If anyone else needs to use the library, line up over here."

Within a few minutes, they were being led to the library at last. When they did, Hermione got a bunch of books for her classes, of course, but also asked the librarian for several books about magical creatures, too.

Harry and Ron helped Hermione read through the books about magical monsters. About half an hour later, Hermione poked them to get their attention. Then, right before their eyes, she did the most un-Hermione-ish thing ever, and tore a page out of the old book, making both boys gasp in shock.

Ignoring them, she pointed her wand at the page, saying, "Gemino." A copy of the page appeared, looking identical in every way. She took the original page, put it back in the book, and said, "Reparo." It was good as new.

She jotted a quick note on the copy. Then, as though she'd done nothing more unusual than shoo a fly away, Hermione pointed at the copied page.

"I found it!"

Harry looked at the page, and read:

 _Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land, there is none more curious or more deadly than the Basilisk, known also as the King of Serpents. This snake, which may reach gigantic size and live many hundreds of years, is born from a chicken's egg, hatched beneath a toad. Its methods of killing are most wondrous, for aside from its deadly and venomous fangs, the Basilisk has a murderous stare, and all who are fixed with the beam of its eye shall suffer instant death. Spiders flee before the Basilisk, for it is their mortal enemy, and the Basilisk flees only from the crowing of the rooster, which is fatal to it._

And beneath this, Hermione had written a single word: _Pipes._

The collective's mind immediately went into overdrive, everyone talking at once; but unlike in the outside world, this didn't result in chaos.

"Ron," he breathed. "She's right. This is it. This is the answer. The monster in the Chamber's a _basilisk_ — a giant serpent! Of course, we already figured it was a snake creature, because of it speaking Parseltongue."

He pictured Colin, petrified; Nick and Justin as well. Having not seen Penelope or the Grey Lady petrified, he couldn't picture them that way.

"The basilisk kills people by looking at them. But no one's died — because no one looked it straight in the eye. Colin saw it through his camera. The basilisk burned up all the film inside it, but Colin just got Petrified. Justin … Justin must've seen the basilisk _through_ Nearly Headless Nick! Nick got the full blast of it, but he couldn't die _again_ … and the same thing happened with Penelope and the Grey Lady!"

Ron's jaw had dropped.

"And Mrs. Norris?" he whispered eagerly.

"Well that's obvious, isn't it?" Hermione said. "The water on the ground that night."

"She saw its reflection! Myrtle flooded the bathroom, and Mrs. Norris caught the reflection!"

He scanned the page in his hand eagerly. The more he looked at it, the more it made sense.

"… _The crowing of the rooster_ … _is fatal to it_!" he read aloud. "Hagrid's roosters were killed! The Heir of Slytherin didn't want one anywhere near the castle once the Chamber was opened! _Spiders flee before it_! It all fits!"

"But how's the basilisk been getting around the place?" said Ron. "A giant snake … Someone would've seen …"

Hermione pointed at the word she'd scribbled at the foot of the page.

"Pipes," she said. "Pipes … Ron, it's been using the plumbing."

"Yes!" Harry said, excited. "I've been hearing that voice inside the walls. …"

Ron suddenly grabbed Harry's arm.

"The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets!" he said hoarsely. "What if it's a bathroom? What if it's in —"

"— _Moaning Myrtle's bathroom,_ " said Harry and Hermione in stereo.

They sat there, excitement coursing through them, hardly able to believe it.

"What're we going to do?" said Ron, whose eyes were flashing. "Should we go straight to McGonagall?"

"Yeah. Is she still around here?"

"Let me find out," Hermione said, and went over to Ms. Pince.

McGonagall, as it turned out, had left to go to the staffroom. Not wanting to be discovered hanging around in the corridor, they all went straight into the deserted staffroom. It was a large, paneled room full of dark, wooden chairs. Harry, Ron, and Hermione paced around it, too excited to sit down.

But the bell to signal break never came.

Instead, echoing through the corridors came Professor McGonagall's voice, magically magnified.

" _All students to return to their House dormitories at once. All teachers return to the staffroom. Immediately, please._ "

Harry wheeled around to stare at his friends.

"Another attack? Now?"

"What'll we do?" said Ron, aghast. "Go back to the dormitory?"

"No," said Harry, glancing around. There was an ugly sort of wardrobe to his left, full of the teachers' cloaks. "In here. Let's hear what it's all about. Then we can tell them what we've found out."

"I don't know, Harry," Hermione said, worried. "What if we're caught?"

"Oh come _on_ ," said Ron, ushering Hermione in impatiently.

It was a tight squeeze, all three of them in one old wardrobe, but they managed it. Then they waited, listening to the mass of people moving around the school, until finally the mostly nervous teachers filtered in.

"It has happened," she told the silent staffroom. "A student has been taken by the monster. Right into the Chamber itself."

Professor Flitwick let out a squeal. Professor Sprout clapped her hands over her mouth. Snape gripped the back of a chair very hard and said, "How can you be sure?"

"The Heir of Slytherin," said Professor McGonagall, who was very white, "left another message. Right underneath the first one. 'Her skeleton will lie in the Chamber forever.' "

Professor Flitwick burst into tears.

"Who is it?" said Madam Hooch, who had sunk, weak-kneed, into a chair. "Which student?"

"Ginny Weasley," said Professor McGonagall.

Harry felt Ron slide silently down onto the wardrobe floor beside him. Iliana's worry and fear threatened to force another transformation, but Harry fought it down. Hermione had her hands over her mouth, a silent tear rolling down her cheek.

The teachers began talking about closing the school tomorrow. But they were interrupted by Lockhart, who was utterly oblivious to the change of tone. The teachers swiftly disabused him of this, though; once they got over their shock at his entrance, Snape and the others told the coward his time had come at last to prove himself, that it was time for the famous Gilderoy Lockhart to once more save the day.

Lockhart did not take this well. His good looks evaporated as he became visibly terrified. He hemmed and hawed for a while, but finally told them, dejectedly, that he would be in his office getting ready.

"Right," said Professor McGonagall, whose nostrils were flared, "that's got _him_ out from under our feet. The Heads of Houses should go and inform their students what has happened. Tell them the Hogwarts Express will take them home first thing tomorrow. Will the rest of you please make sure no students have been left outside their dormitories."

The teachers rose and left, one by one.

Back at Griffindor tower later, Harry, Hermione, and the Weasleys all sat around, glum and horror-struck by the news of Ginny.

No afternoon ever lasted as long as that one, nor had Gryffindor Tower ever been so crowded, yet so quiet. Near sunset, Fred and George went up to bed, unable to sit there any longer.

"You were right, Harry; she knew something," said Ron, speaking for the first time since they had entered the wardrobe in the staffroom. "That's why she was taken. It wasn't some stupid thing about Percy at all. She'd found out something about the Chamber of Secrets. That must be why she was —" Ron rubbed his eyes frantically. "I mean, she was a pureblood. There can't be any other reason."

"Do you think she's still...?" Hermione asked in a very small voice, not wanting to say the whole thing.

Harry and the rest of the collective doubted it very much, but didn't say so. Despite this, when Ron suggested they go find Lockhart, to tell him what they knew, they agreed. Nobody stopped them as they left.

Darkness was falling as they walked down to Lockhart's office. There seemed to be a lot of activity going on inside it. They could hear scraping, thumps, and hurried footsteps.

Harry knocked and there was a sudden silence from inside. Then the door opened the tiniest crack and they saw one of Lockhart's eyes peering through it.

"Oh, Mr. Potter – Mr. Weasley – Ms. Granger. I'm a little busy right now, can you come back later?"

"Sir, we know you're going to the Chamber. We have some information for you. We think it'll help."

"Er — well — it's not terribly —" The side of Lockhart's face that they could see looked very uncomfortable. "I mean — well — all right —"

He opened the door and they entered.

It was immediately apparent that Lockhart had no intention of going to the Chamber, for the room was being stripped, and he was packing. Everyone in the collective getting angry at once, they turned their wand on Lockhart.

"Going somewhere, are you? You really are just a coward, aren't you?"

"Er, well, yes," said Lockhart, ripping a life-size poster of himself from the back of the door as he spoke and starting to roll it up. "Urgent call — unavoidable — got to go —"

"What about my sister?" said Ron jerkily.

"Well, as to that — most unfortunate —" said Lockhart, avoiding their eyes as he wrenched open a drawer and started emptying the contents into a bag. "No one regrets more than I —"

"You're the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher!" said Harry. "You can't go now! Not with all the Dark stuff going on here!"

"Well — I must say — when I took the job —" Lockhart muttered, now piling socks on top of his robes. "nothing in the job description — didn't expect —"

"You mean you're _running away_? said Harry disbelievingly. "After all that stuff you did in your books —"

"Books can be misleading," said Lockhart delicately.

"I believed your books," Hermione said, tears running down her cheeks. "Now come to find you're just a fraud and a coward! And your books are all a pack of lies!"

"I didn't lie. Those things really happened. Just not... not to me."

" _What?_ "

"My dear girl," said Lockhart, straightening up and frowning at Hermione. "Do use your common sense. My books wouldn't have sold half as well if people didn't think _I'd_ done all those things. No one wants to read about some ugly old Armenian warlock, even if he did save a village from werewolves. He'd look dreadful on the front cover. No dress sense at all. And the witch who banished the Bandon Banshee had a hairy chin. I mean, come on —"

"So you've just been taking credit for what a load of other people have done?" said Harry incredulously.

"Harry, Harry," said Lockhart, shaking his head impatiently, "it's not nearly as simple as that. There was work involved. I had to track these people down. Ask them exactly how they managed to do what they did. Then I had to put a Memory Charm on them so they wouldn't remember doing it. If there's one thing I pride myself on, it's my Memory Charms. No, it's been a lot of work, Harry. It's not all book signings and publicity photos, you know. You want fame, you have to be prepared for a long hard slog."

He banged the lids of his trunks shut and locked them.

"Let's see," he said. "I think that's everything. Yes. Only one thing left."

He pulled out his wand and turned to them.

"Awfully sorry, kids, but I'll have to put a Memory Charm on you now. Can't have you blabbing my secrets all over the place. I'd never sell another book —"

Just in time, Harry and Hermione raised their wands. Lockhart had barely raised his, when they bellowed, " _Expelliarmus_!"

Lockhart was blasted backward, falling over his trunk; his wand flew high into the air; Ron caught it, and flung it out of the open window.

"I'm 12, and I'm officially a more qualified wizard than you are, Lockhart," Harry said venomously.

"What's the point of all this? I don't know where the Chamber is, I never did! And even if I did, and had my wand, I'm useless."

Harry grinned maliciously. "You'll make a good human shield, at least."

Lockhart opened his mouth to counter that, but couldn't think of anything to say.

"Anyway, you're in luck. We think we know where it is _and_ what the monster is. So let's get moving."

With all three of them pointing their wands at Lockhart, they guided him to Myrtle's bathroom. They found her sitting on one of the toilet tanks.

"Oh, it's you again. What do you want now?"

"To ask you how you died," Harry said.

Myrtle's whole aspect changed at once. She looked as though she had never been asked such a flattering question.

"Ooooh, it was dreadful," she said with relish. "It happened right in here. I died in this very stall. I remember it so well. I'd hidden because Olive Hornby was teasing me about my glasses. The door was locked, and I was crying, and then I heard somebody come in. They said something funny. A different language, I think it must have been. Anyway, what really got me was that it was a _boy_ speaking. So I unlocked the door, to tell him to go and use his own toilet, and then —" Myrtle swelled importantly, her face shining. "I _died._ "

"How?" said Harry.

"No idea," said Myrtle in hushed tones. "I just remember seeing a pair of great, big, yellow eyes. My whole body sort of seized up, and then I was floating away. …" She looked dreamily at Harry. "And then I came back again. I was determined to haunt Olive Hornby, you see. Oh, she was sorry she'd ever laughed at my glasses."

"Where exactly did you see the eyes?" said Harry.

"Somewhere there," said Myrtle, pointing vaguely toward the sink in front of her toilet.

They hurried over to where she had indicated. It looked like a perfectly ordinary sink. But after several minutes of close inspection, Harry saw it: Scratched on the side of one of the copper taps was a tiny snake.

"That tap's never worked," said Myrtle brightly as he tried to turn it.

"Harry," said Ron. "Say something. Something in Parseltongue."

 _'Open,'_ he tried.

The sink began to move; the sink, in fact, sank, right out of sight, leaving a large pipe exposed, a pipe wide enough for a man to slide into.

"I'm going down there," Harry said.

He couldn't not go, not now they had found the entrance to the Chamber, not if there was even the faintest, slimmest, wildest chance that Ginny might be alive.

"Me too," said Ron.

"And me," said Hermione.

"Well, you hardly seem to need me," said Lockhart, with a shadow of his old smile. "I'll just —"

He put his hand on the door knob, but they stopped him.

"You're coming too," Harry said, and pushed Lockhart over to the sink, then into the pipe.

Their emotions were so intense just then, that they were doing something they'd not done for a long time, different parts of their body changing color and shape, their hair changing texture, eye color changing, as they all vied subconsciously for control of the body.

Harry went down after Lockhart, then Ron came down, then Hermione. Hermione paused to use her wand to clean their robes; everyone except Lockhart, whom she ignored.

They lit their wands.

"Any sign of movement, close your eyes right away."

There was no movement, though, and no sound, except the crunch of rat bones underneath. It was very dark, as well; they lit their wands and slunk carefully through the darkness. A few minutes in, they had to stop suddenly; Lockhart closed his eyes.

Harry took a closer look at the shape. "It's just a snakeskin. Not the snake."

 _ **Wow, I wonder how much this is worth?**_

 _Is this really the time, Al?_

There was a sudden movement behind them. Gilderoy Lockhart's knees had given way.

"Get up," said Ron sharply, pointing his wand at Lockhart.

Lockhart got to his feet — then he dived at Ron, knocking him to the ground, bowling over Harry and Hermione as well, making them drop their wands.

Harry and Hermione jumped forward to retrieve their wands, but too late — Lockhart was straightening up, panting, Ron's wand in his hand and a gleaming smile back on his face.

"The adventure ends here, kids!" he said. "I shall take a bit of this skin back up to the school, tell them I was too late to save the girl, and that you three _tragically_ lost your minds at the sight of her mangled body — say good-bye to your memories!"

He raised Ron's old, decrepit wand high over his head and yelled, " _Obliviate_!"

It was like a bomb going off. There was rubble everywhere, screaming, and chaos. When it was all over, there was a wall of rubble between him and where Ron, Lockhart, and Hermione were.

"Ron! Hermione! Are you alright in there?"

Someone coughed, then Ron said, "We're okay, Harry. This git isn't, though; he got blasted by the wand. Serves him right, I say. Shite! My wand, it's in pieces! Guess it went out with a literal bang."

"Well okay. You two clear a path through the rock – by hand! We don't need any more accidents. I'll go on and find Ginny, okay?"

"Okay, Harry," Hermione said. "Be safe. We'll see you later."

And he set off alone past the giant snake skin.

He wandered through the darkness until past the time when the sound of shifting rocks disappeared. At last, as he crept around yet another bend, he saw a solid wall ahead on which two entwined serpents were carved, their eyes set with great, glinting emeralds.

 _'Open.'_ He said at them.

The serpents parted as the wall cracked open, the halves slid smoothly out of sight, and Harry, shaking from head to foot, walked inside.

The chamber was beautiful in an eerie way, more snake statues looking at him with curiously alive-looking eyes. It was big, too, with a tall ceiling. And at the end of this was an enormous statue of an old man with monkeyish features.

 _ **Statue that huge, I think ol' Sally was compensating for something**_ , Al remarked. Harry ignored him.

He looked down. Between the statue's feet, face-down, lay a small, black-robed figure with flaming-red hair.

" _Ginny_!" Harry muttered, sprinting to her and dropping to his knees. "Ginny — don't be dead — please don't be dead —" he stowed his wand, grabbed Ginny's shoulders, and turned her over. Her face was white as marble, and as cold, yet her eyes were closed, so she wasn't Petrified. But then she must be —

"Ginny, please wake up," Harry muttered desperately, shaking her. Ginny's head lolled hopelessly from side to side.

"She won't wake," said a soft voice.

Harry jumped and spun around on his knees, pointing his wand at the voice.

A tall, black-haired boy was leaning against the nearest pillar, watching. He was strangely blurred around the edges, as though Harry were looking at him through a misted window. But there was no mistaking him.

"YOU! You did this! Stop it now!"

"Ah, so you figured it out, then? But again, with five different people in your head, from what I hear, all of you would have to be utter morons to not figure it out. Especially with all the clues I left you."

"Clues?"

"Why, yes. Haven't you figured out the other part of things yet?"

At these words, they knew what he meant.

"You were using Ginny. You're trapped in this book, so you needed Ginny. You got into her head somehow, controlled her."

"Yes, indeed. My, you are quite astute. You would make an excellent Death Eater."

"I already told the other you, the shriveled, ugly half-ghost you, that I would die before being one of your minions, Tom."

Tom flinched. "You know who I am, so call me the Dark Lord!"

"You're not a lord, though. You're an orphan, with no land or property to his name. 'Lord Voldemort.' French, right? Means 'cold death'? How _pretentious_."

The older boy glared at him. "If you would loan me your wand, Harry, I would be glad to show you how I came up with the name."

"No thanks. Don't care." He jabbed his wand at Tom Riddle. "Let her go now."

Riddle chuckled. "There's nothing you can do to me with that. The weaker Ginny grows, the stronger I get. Pathetic child, she was all too willing to pour her heart out to a kind stranger she found in a strange book. It was soo easy to use her."

Harry shot a spell at Tom; it went right through him.

"I told you it's no use, Harry. Anyway, I'm glad we could have this little chat. I've been wanting to know more about you ever since Ginny started telling me about you."

"No doubt curious how I survived."

"Yes. That does puzzle me, how an infant-"

"It was my mother, Tom. My common, Muggle-born mother; she died to protect me."

"DON'T CALL ME TOM!"

"Why not? You don't like that name?"

"It is a common name, the name of my worthless Muggle father."

"Got Daddy issues, eh, Tom? Po wittle bebe."

Tom growled angrily. "FINE! Fine. I know what I wanted to know, now. That's all that matters. A freak accident, not fate at all. Good. Now I can kill you."

Tom Riddle turned toward the giant statue of Slytherin, and spoke Parseltongue.

 _'Salazar Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts four, speak to me!'_

For reasons they couldn't have explained, even later, they were overtaken by a transformation. The glow of the transformation caught Tom's attention, and he witnessed them grow into Alastair.

"Ah, you must be Alastair Potter. Well you will be dying tonight too, along with the rest of you. It's a shame, really; you would be invaluable as Death Eaters. Unless... perhaps... does Harry speak for all of you?"

"Yes he does, Tommy boy."

"DO NOT CALL ME TOM, TOMMY, OR TOMMY BOY! I AM LORD VOLDEMORT! YOU WILL CALL ME 'DARK LORD'!"

"Aw, is Tommy-Wommy having a wittle tantwum?"

 _'GET OUT HERE AND KILL HIM!'_

Slytherin's gigantic stone face was moving. Horrorstruck, Al saw his mouth opening, wider and wider, to make a huge black hole.

And something was stirring inside the statue's mouth. Something was slithering up from its depths.

He backed away and closed his eyes. This was it; he had his wand against a giant snake, which right now felt like just a piece of wood in his hand. What was he to do? He didn't know any spells that would work against a basilisk.

When he felt the thud of something very heavy hit the ground, his desperate brain gave him the only idea he could think of: talk to it.

 _'Hey Mr. Basilisk, does this asshole feed you?'_

The snake, which had been slithering towards him, froze. _'What?'_

Tom looked panicked. Only he was supposed to speak to the basilisk, and be obeyed.

 _'IGNORE HIM!'_

 _'I saw all those rat bones. That the only thing you've been eating all this time, rats? A creature as enormous and majestic as you, subsisting on vermin? Doesn't befit the king of serpents, to my view. And here's this guy, giving you orders and nothing else. He's not even competent enough to get you human prey; nobody's died yet. Why can't he at least sneak into the kitchens and get you a side of beef or a whole turkey or something like that? Fact is, he could; he doesn't want to. You're just a tool to him. King of serpents, reduced to a servant.'_

With his eyes closed, he couldn't see what the giant snake was doing, but he could hear it wasn't moving.

 _'You are right, human. I have been so hungry, for so long.'_

 _'Makes sense. It's a shame, really; I can't look at you right now, because I don't want to die, but I'm sure you're beautiful. I saw that skin you shed, recently. If that's even half as lustrous as your living skin, you must be gorgeous. You deserve to be treated like royalty.'_

 _'HE IS SIMPLY SPINNING YOU A TALE! KILL HIM!'_

 _'Join my side,'_ Al continued, _'and I promise on my magic I will bring you food worthy of a king.'_

 _'Hmm...'_ the snake said.

 _'DO NOT LISTEN TO HIM, HE IS MERELY TRYING TO SAVE HIS OWN SKIN!'_

 _'You know, Tom, I really don't think Salazar would approve of this blatant animal abuse. Letting this magnificent creature subsist on vermin? Really, what were you thinking?'_

 _'Smaller human, you know how to bring me food worthy of a king?'_

 _'Yes. I could go to the kitchens, get food from the house elves. Heck, if nothing else, I have millions of galleons in my Gringotts account, I could buy you entire cows and goats if you wanted them, live prey, and hardly make a dent in my savings.'_

 _'And you swear on your magic?'_

 _'I swear on my magic I will feed you feasts worthy of the king of serpents, if you join my side against Tom Riddle.'_

The giant snake chuckled, an eerie sound. _'You have a deal, human.'_

 _'NO! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!'_

The basilisk rounded on Tom. _'YOU ARE NOT MY MASTER! I AM MY OWN MASTER! AND I HAVE A NEW ALLY!'_

Al peeked very carefully out, and saw the snake staring Tom down.

 _'Why is it not working? What are you?'_ the basilisk demanded of Tom.

 _'He's a memory trapped in a book. Here,'_ Al said picking up the diary and tossing it at the snake's head. _'Bite down on this, it will kill him!'_

 _'NOOOO!'_

The basilisk turned its head, and Al closed his eyes just in time. He didn't know if the creature did as he asked until he heard Tom screaming in agony.

 _'Please close your eyes, so I can watch my enemy die.'_

 _'Understood. They are closed now.'_

Al opened his eyes cautiously, and saw the basilisk was telling the truth. He looked at Tom, who was clutching his head, screaming, and burning. Then he screamed one last time, exploded, and was gone.

When he calmed down enough to speak again, he said, _'I wish to retrieve the book for a trophy of our victory.'_

 _'You may have it.'_

He walked over to the basilisk's open mouth. It was very nerve-wracking pulling the diary off of the basilisk's fang, afraid the serpent would change its mind, but he got the diary off its fang and backed away.

 _'Thank you. Now, the girl will wake up any moment now, and I don't want to frighten her more than I have to. If you go back into hiding, I will be sure you get the biggest slab of meat I can find from the kitchen this very night.'_

 _'I will hold you to that, human.'_

 _'Understood.'_

 _'I go now, human. See you later tonight.'_

He heard the thing slide away. He waited, his eyes pressed together, until the sound, growing fainter and fainter, disappeared. Only then did he open his eyes and go over to Ginny, who was stirring. Al hurried toward her as she sat up. Her bemused eyes looked around in terror at the empty Chamber, then to the diary in his hand. She drew a great, shuddering gasp and tears began to pour down her face.

"Al! I tried to tell Harry at b-breakfast, but I c-couldn't say it in front of P-Percy! It was _me_ , Al-"

"Shh, I know. Riddle told me all about how he controlled you, got into your head with the magic of the diary. It's not your fault, Ginny; he used you like a tool. He was actually Voldemort."

She squealed in terror at the name. "T-Tom... was You-Know-Who?"

"Yes. He uses people, he can be charming when he wants to be. He used evil magic to make you his meat puppet. It's not your fault he had his magical hand up your-"

 _AL!_

"But that's probably inappropriate. The point is, Ginny; you're not remotely at fault. In fact, I have a pretty good idea who's to blame."

"W-who?"

"I think Lucius Malfoy put this diary in your book, that day at Flourish and Blotts."

She gasped. Then she shuddered and began to cry. He let her cry into his shoulder, and he picked her up.

"Come on, let's go."

"B-but, the b-basilisk! What if it shows up?"

He decided to give her a comforting lie. "I mortally wounded it with a spell I read about in a book once. Lucky shot, it's a miracle I survived. It crawled back into its hidey-hole and died. Tom was quite distraught."

"How did you kill him?"

"It flailed around in pain before going back to its hidey-hole, accidentally bit the diary as it did. See? Nice big sizzling hole in it." He showed her the dead diary.

"So Tom's d-dead?"

"The diary was his body. So yeah, he's dead."

She began to cry again.

"N-nobody's going to b-believe me! They'll t-think I did it!"

"Dumbledore will believe."

"He's not h-here."

"Before he left, he told me he would never really leave the school. And I'm sure McGonagall will believe you. I believe you. If anyone tries punishing you for this, I'll demand they give me the same punishment. That usually shuts them up."

There was a beautiful sound, suddenly, like the most heavenly singing, but birdlike. Then with a whoosh of flames, a beautiful red and gold plumed bird appeared.

"Hey, it's Dumbledore's phoenix, Fawkes. Hey Fawkes, what're you doing here?"

It sang again, then perched on Al's shoulder.

"Too bad I don't speak Phoenix language. Well whatever, you can tag along."

Ginny was still crying when they got to the hole in the wall that Hermione and Ron had cleared for them.

"Ron! Ginny's alive and well. Crying and exhausted, but alive and well."

He heard Ron give a strangled cheer, and they turned the next bend to see his and Hermione's eager faces staring through the sizable gap they had managed to make in the rockfall.

" _Ginny_!" Ron thrust an arm through the gap in the rock to pull her through first. "You're alive! I don't believe it! What happened? How — what — where did that bird come from?"

Fawkes had swooped through the gap after Ginny.

"He's Dumbledore's," said Al, squeezing through himself.

"What happened down there?"

"Short story: we were right, Tom Riddle was Voldemort. Key word there is 'was,'" he said, holding up the diary so Ron and Hermione could see the hole in it.

"Long story can wait for later."

"But —"

"Later," Al said shortly. He didn't think it was a good idea to tell Ron yet who'd been opening the Chamber, not in front of Ginny, anyway. "Where's Lockhart?"

"Back there," said Ron, still looking puzzled but jerking his head up the tunnel toward the pipe. "He's in a bad way. Come and see."

The git had completely erased his memories. He could speak, and presumably was still toilet trained, but he was a dimmer bulb than normal, and couldn't remember anything for more than a few seconds. But rather than being disturbed by this, he was quite content.

Al looked up at the pipe. "Well this is lovely. How're we gonna get up there?"

Fawkes came off Al's shoulder and floated there, holding a tail feather. Al looked at him dubiously.

"He looks like he wants you to grab hold …" said Ron, looking perplexed. "But you're much too heavy for a bird to pull up there —"

"Oh Ron, don't you read? This is a phoenix. They can carry immensely heavy loads," Hermione said. "And their tears have healing powers. They're amazing birds, I can't believe Dumbledore keeps one as a pet."

Al turned quickly to the others. "We've got to hold on to each other. Ginny, grab Ron's hand. Hermione, you get Ginny's other hand. Professor Lockhart —"

"He means you," said Ron sharply to Lockhart.

"You hold Hermione's other hand —"

Al tucked the diary into his belt and added his hand to the end of the chain. Then, impossibly, they all floated up and out of the chamber.

"Amazing! This is just like magic!" Lockhart cried.

A few minutes of chill air whipping by, and they were landing on the wet floor of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, the Chamber closing behind them.

Myrtle goggled at them.

"You're alive," she said blankly to Al.

"Sharp as a tack, you are. You sound almost disappointed."

"Oh, well … I'd just been thinking … if you had died, you'd have been welcome to share my toilet," said Myrtle, blushing silver.

"If I were to die, and if I were to leave a ghost, I might join you; but I'd insist we haunt somewhere more impressive than a loo," Al responded.

As they left the bathroom, Ron asked, "What do we do now?"

Al pointed. "McGonagall's office."

Fawkes was leading the way, glowing gold along the corridor. They strode after him, and moments later, found themselves outside Professor McGonagall's office.

Harry knocked and pushed the door open.

Silence reigned for a moment while they stood there, until Mrs. Weasley screamed Ginny's name, and clutched her daughter for dear life, both women crying.

Al, however, was looking past them. Professor Dumbledore was standing by the mantelpiece, beaming, next to Professor McGonagall, who was taking great, steadying gasps, clutching her chest. Fawkes went whooshing past Al's ear and settled on Dumbledore's shoulder, just as Al found himself and Ron being swept into Mrs. Weasley's tight embrace.

"You saved her! You saved her! _How_ did you do it?"

"I think we'd all like to know that," said Professor McGonagall weakly.

He sat down, and began telling them everything. For 15 minutes he spoke to the rapt adults and kids, explaining about the eerie voice that turned out to be Parseltongue, the diary, their theory about Riddle being Voldemort, even the trip into the Forbidden Forest to see Aragog, and finally finding the answer – basilisk – in the library. And, of course, the Moaning Myrtle connection.

"Very well," Professor McGonagall prompted him as he paused, "so you found out where the entrance was — breaking a hundred school rules into pieces along the way, I might add — but how on _earth_ did you all get out of there alive, Potter?"

His voice growing hoarse, Al went with the lie he'd told Ginny, but adding parts of the truth to it.

"Found Ginny lying facedown on the ground, and Tom Riddle standing there. Knew at once who he was, pointed my wand at him. Hit him with a spell, but it went through him without hurting him. He told me nothing I could do with my wand would hurt him. Something about his tone made me think he was including the diary in that. The thing seems to be supernaturally impervious to harm. Or it did.

"Anyway, after he was done discussing me and how I survived as a baby, he summoned his basilisk, and I shot some spells I'd read about at the thing. One of them was a lucky shot, mortally wounding the thing. It thrashed around in pain, accidentally biting the diary. Well, okay, I may have influenced that luck a little. But anyway, it bit the diary, Riddle died, and then the basilisk crawled into its hidey-hole to die, and died."

"And if this Riddle was just a spirit as you say, Potter, then how-"

"He used another. He tricked someone innocent into spilling their soul to him, and he reached up inside of that person and took control," he said, looking at Dumbledore.

"Voldemort does have that effect on people," the man said. "Odd, though, that he could be here when my sources tell me he's hiding in Albania."

"I don't think this diary was a normal diary. It was... alive. I met Tom once before tonight, he took us into one of his memories. He was 16 when he wrote this diary," he said, handing the thing to Dumbledore, who examined it carefully.

"Who did he trick, though, Potter?" McGonagall wanted to know. "Who was it he was controlling?"

"Ginny Weasley. And I think Lucius Malfoy slipped her the book that day at Flourish and Blotts."

Mrs. Weasley started going into fits of worry at this, and Mr. Weasley glowered at thin air, his hands twitching.

"Brilliant," Dumbledore said softly, examining the diary. "Of course, he was probably the most brilliant student Hogwarts has ever seen." He turned around to the Weasleys, who were looking utterly bewildered.

"Very few people know that Lord Voldemort was once called Tom Riddle. I taught him myself, fifty years ago, at Hogwarts. He disappeared after leaving the school … traveled far and wide … sank so deeply into the Dark Arts, consorted with the very worst of our kind, underwent so many dangerous, magical transformations, that when he resurfaced as Lord Voldemort, he was barely recognizable. Hardly anyone connected Lord Voldemort with the clever, handsome boy who was once Head Boy here."

"But, Ginny," said Mrs. Weasley. "I'm still so confused. What's our Ginny got to do with — with — _him_?"

"His d-diary!" Ginny sobbed. "I've b-been writing in it, and he's been w-writing back all year —"

" _Ginny_!" said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. "Haven't I taught you _anything_? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself _if you can't see where it keeps its brain._ Why didn't you show the diary to me, or your mother? A suspicious object like that, it was _clearly_ full of Dark Magic —"

"That's kind of an overly broad rule of thumb, Mr. Weasley," Al said. "As it applies to all the portraits in the school, and some of the mirrors. But yeah, I guess there was a significant difference between them and this diary."

"I d-didn't know," sobbed Ginny. "I found it inside one of the books Mum got me. I th-thought someone had just left it in there and forgotten about it —"

"Miss Weasley should go up to the hospital wing right away," Dumbledore interrupted in a firm voice. "This has been a terrible ordeal for her. There will be no punishment. Older and wiser wizards than she have been hoodwinked by Lord Voldemort." He strode over to the door and opened it. "Bed rest and perhaps a large, steaming mug of hot chocolate. I always find that cheers me up," he added, twinkling kindly down at her. "You will find that Madam Pomfrey is still awake. She's just giving out Mandrake juice — I daresay the basilisk's victims will be waking up any moment."

"So Colin will be okay?"

"There has been no lasting harm done, Ginny," said Dumbledore.

Mrs. Weasley led Ginny out, and Mr. Weasley followed, still looking deeply shaken.

"You know, Minerva," Professor Dumbledore said thoughtfully to Professor McGonagall, "I think all this merits a good _feast._ Might I ask you to go and alert the kitchens?"

"Right," said Professor McGonagall crisply, also moving to the door. "I'll leave you to deal with Potter, Granger, and Weasley, shall I?"

"Certainly," said Dumbledore.

She left the three of them feeling very nervous.

"Alastair, I believe you promised me you wouldn't dig into this anymore, after our talk following Justin and Nicolas's attack. You promised me you would keep yourself safe."

"What?" Ron and Hermione said in stereo, shocked.

"And you didn't tell your friends about that promise, either, I see."

Al shrugged. "I fibbed a little."

"You lied to me. But I will forgive it this time, given the circumstances."

He paused a moment before speaking again.

"You three will receive special awards for services to the school. And, let me see, 150 points apiece for Griffindor.

"But one of us seems to be keeping mightily quiet about his part in this dangerous adventure," Dumbledore added. "Why so modest, Gilderoy?"

Al jumped, startled. He'd forgotten about Gitteroy Blockhead. He turned and saw that Lockhart was standing in a corner of the room, still wearing his vague smile. When Dumbledore addressed him, Lockhart looked over his shoulder to see who he was talking to.

"Er, Professor," Hermione started.

"It was my wand," Ron said. "He took my wand, tried to obliviate the three of us, and it blew up in his face. He's lost his whole memory."

"Ah, Gilderoy, hoisted on your own petard."

"Petard?" Gilderoy said, confused. "What's a petard?"

"Would you two mind taking Professor Lockhart up to the infirmary, too?" Dumbledore said to Ron and Hermione. "I wish to speak with Alastair some more."

They nodded, and led the man out the room.

Al sat down expectantly, tempted to put his feet up on the desk, but resisting the urge. Dumbledore sat down behind his desk.

"First of all, Alastair, I want to thank you," said Dumbledore, eyes twinkling again. "You must have shown me real loyalty down in the Chamber. Nothing but that could have called Fawkes to you."

"I dunno about that. I don't know why he showed up. Though it might've been more help if it had happened earlier, but I don't think we could've gotten out again without him."

"Oh, there are other ways. A featherlight charm and _wingardium leviosa_ on yourself in combination would get you up the pipe you described."

Al nodded.

"I got the sense you lied to us today in your story. The story contained elements of the truth, but there's a lie in there somewhere, am I correct?"

"Yeah. I didn't kill the basilisk. I wouldn't have known how."

"So it is still alive?"

"Yup. In desperation, knowing my wand was largely useless, I fell back on my other skill: Parseltongue."

Dumbledore's eyes twinkled at him. "You charmed the snake, did you?"

"Yeah. Promised it I would feed it meals fit for the king of serpents. I saw it had been eating nothing but rats for 1000 years, so I figured it could use some variety. And unlike the promise I made to you, I meant this one. I promised on my magic."

"Ah. Well then, I think we can work out an arrangement for it, then. I shall speak with the house elves about it later."

"I also promised to bring it something tonight."

"Well, that can be arranged."

Dumbledore stroked his phoenix before continuing.

"And so you met Tom Riddle. I'm sure he was quite interested in meeting you."

"Yes, he was. Wanted to know how I survived as a baby. I told him my mother died to protect me. But that isn't the whole story, is it? If it was that simple, I wouldn't be the first survivor, I'd be like, the four millionth."

"You are correct, there is probably more to the story than that."

"And I think you know more than you're telling me, don't you? It has something to do with how we can speak Parseltongue, like he can."

"You and your collective can speak Parseltongue, Alastair," said Dumbledore calmly, "because Lord Voldemort — who _is_ the last remaining descendant of Salazar Slytherin — can speak Parseltongue. Unless I'm much mistaken, he transferred some of his own powers to you the night he gave you that scar. Not something he intended to do, I'm sure."

"That diary seemed awfully alive for just a memory, sir. Tell me, is it possible he put a bit of himself in the diary, too?"

Dumbledore was looking uncomfortable. It was hard to see, most people would miss it, but they saw it.

"If you know something, you should tell me. I figure we're pretty much fated to fight him. Been here two years, been attacked by him twice, I figure that's significant. Then there's the fact that Firenze called us 'The Chorus that Sings a Song Against Evil.' Said it was written in the stars."

"Alastair, I am truly sorry, but once more, I cannot answer that. You are-"

"Don't give me that crap, please. We may only be 12, but we've seen things and done things that nobody else has, and I'm pretty certain it's nowhere near over yet. Knowledge is power, and—"

"I am sorry, but I must insist."

Al opened his mouth to argue again, but someone burst unannounced into the room. It was Lucius Malfoy. Al frowned.

 _ **How rude.**_

The man was plainly furious. And trembling between his legs, wrapped in many bandages, was...

"Dobby! _He's_ your master? Why am I not more surprised?"

For a moment, Dobby looked at Al in confusion. Then he saw Al's scar, the same scar all of the Potter collective had, no matter what body they were in, and he gasped.

"Good evening, Lucius," said Dumbledore pleasantly.

Mr. Malfoy nearly knocked Al out of his seat in his haste to get to Dumbledore. It made Al's hand reach for his wand, in case something happened. Dobby went scurrying in after his master, crouching at the hem of his cloak, a look of abject terror on his face.

The elf was carrying a stained rag with which he was attempting to finish cleaning Mr. Malfoy's shoes. Apparently Mr. Malfoy had set out in a great hurry, for not only were his shoes half-polished, but his usually sleek hair was disheveled. Ignoring the elf bobbing apologetically around his ankles, he fixed his cold eyes upon Dumbledore.

"So!" he said "You've come back. The governors suspended you, but you still saw fit to return to Hogwarts."

"Well, you see, Lucius," said Dumbledore, smiling serenely, "the other eleven governors contacted me today. It was something like being caught in a hailstorm of owls, to tell the truth. They'd heard that Arthur Weasley's daughter had been killed and wanted me back here at once. They seemed to think I was the best man for the job after all. Very strange tales they told me, too. … Several of them seemed to think that you had threatened to curse their families if they didn't agree to suspend me in the first place."

Mr. Malfoy went even paler than usual, but his eyes were still slits of fury.

"So — have you stopped the attacks yet?" he sneered. "Have you caught the culprit?"

"We have," said Dumbledore, with a smile.

" _Well_?" said Mr. Malfoy sharply. "Who is it?"

"The same person as last time, Lucius," said Dumbledore. "But this time, Lord Voldemort was acting through somebody else. By means of this diary."

He held up the small black book with the large hole through the center, watching Mr. Malfoy closely.

At this, Dobby began making motions, trying to communicate to Al. Al nodded at him and mouthed, _I know already._ This made the elf relax in evident relief.

"I see …" said Mr. Malfoy slowly to Dumbledore.

"A clever plan," said Dumbledore in a level voice, still staring Mr. Malfoy straight in the eye. "Because if Alastair here" — Mr. Malfoy shot Al a swift, sharp look — "and his friends Ron and Hermione hadn't discovered this book, why — Ginny Weasley might have taken all the blame. No one would ever have been able to prove she hadn't acted of her own free will."

Mr. Malfoy said nothing. His face was suddenly mask-like.

"And imagine," Dumbledore went on, "what might have happened then. … The Weasleys are one of our most prominent pure-blood families. Imagine the effect on Arthur Weasley and his Muggle Protection Act, if his own daughter was discovered attacking and killing Muggle-borns. … Very fortunate the diary was discovered, and Riddle's memories wiped from it. Who knows what the consequences might have been otherwise. …"

Mr. Malfoy forced himself to speak.

"Very fortunate," he said stiffly.

"Yes," Al said, standing up and crossing his arms. "As if you didn't know."

"I beg your pardon?" Mr. Malfoy said, each word enunciated as though they were slurs.

"You're the one who put the diary in Ginny's cauldron that day you started a fight with Mr. Weasley in the bookstore. You stuck it in her transfiguration book then slipped it back in her cauldron. I'm pretty sure that counts as terrorism."

He saw Mr. Malfoy's white hands clench and unclench.

"Why don't you prove it," he hissed.

"Oh, no one will be able to do that," said Dumbledore, smiling at Al. "Not now that Riddle has vanished from the book. On the other hand, I would advise you, Lucius, not to go giving out any more of Lord Voldemort's old school things. If any more of them find their way into innocent hands, I think Arthur Weasley, for one, will make sure they are traced back to you."

"Yeah, and if you'd seen Mr. Weasley's face earlier... let's just say, if you thought he hated you before, that was nothing to now."

Lucius Malfoy stood for a moment, and Al distinctly saw his right hand twitch as though he was longing to reach for his wand. Instead, he turned to his house-elf.

"We're going, Dobby!"

He wrenched open the door and as the elf came hurrying up to him, he kicked him right through it. They could hear Dobby squealing with pain all the way along the corridor. Al stood for a moment, thinking hard. Then it came to him; well, to Harry, who relayed the message to him.

"Professor Dumbledore," he said hurriedly. "Can I give that diary _back_ to Mr. Malfoy, please?"

"Of course. But hurry. The feast, remember..."

Al grabbed the book and ran out the room. He paused a moment to prepare the package, then ran along until he caught up with the man.

"Mr. Malfoy," he gasped, skidding to a halt, "I've got something for you —"

With a disgusted look, Mr. Malfoy ripped off the filthy sock Al had stretched over the diary, and tossed it aside, looking at the destroyed diary with a mix of fury and fear.

"You'll meet the same sticky end as your parents one of these days, Potter," he said softly. "They were meddlesome fools, too."

He turned to go.

"Come, Dobby. I said, _come._ "

But Dobby didn't move. He was holding up Al's disgusting, slimy sock, and looking at it as though it were a priceless treasure.

"Master has give Dobby a sock."

"What?"

"Master has given a sock," said the elf in wonderment. "Master gave it to Dobby."

"What's that?" spat Mr. Malfoy. "What did you say?"

"Got a sock," said Dobby in disbelief. "Master threw it, and Dobby caught it, and Dobby — Dobby is _free._ "

Lucius Malfoy stood frozen, staring at the elf. Then he lunged at Al.

"You've lost me my servant, boy!"

But Dobby shouted, "You shall not harm Alastair Potter!"

There was a loud bang, and Mr. Malfoy was thrown backward. He crashed down the stairs, three at a time, landing in a crumpled heap on the landing below. He got up, his face livid, and pulled out his wand, but Dobby raised a long, threatening finger.

"You shall go now," he said fiercely, pointing down at Mr. Malfoy. "You shall not touch the Potters. You shall go now."

Lucius Malfoy had no choice. With a last, incensed stare at the pair of them, he swung his cloak around him and hurried out of sight.

"Alastair Potter freed Dobby!" said the elf shrilly, gazing up at Al, moonlight from the nearest window reflected in his orb-like eyes. "Alastair Potter set Dobby free!"

"It was Harry's idea. But I liked it. Nobody deserves to be treated like he treated you. Well, maybe _he_ does. Just promise not to try to save our life again?"

The elf's ugly brown face split suddenly into a wide, toothy smile, but didn't promise.

Al took a moment to explain to Dobby how they'd worked out his clue. Dobby grinned.

"Dobby is most happy to be of service to the Potters."

"Well, I'd better go. There's a feast on. Would you like to come?"

"Dobby eat at a table with wizards and witches?" The elf said in wonderment.

"Yes. I doubt he fed you adequately. And we couldn't have saved the day without your help."

"Dobby would be _honored,"_ the elf said. "But..." he looked down at his filthy clothes.

With a flash of light, Zoey stood there. Dobby blinked at her, having never met her either. Then she pointed a finger at him, his clothing glowed, and suddenly he was wearing a clean little suit. He was still barefoot, but he was clean and dressed. The lone sock of Al's was clean, so the elf put it on.

"Thank you, Miss... Miss..."

"Zoey Potter," she said, hugging Dobby. "Come, let's stuff our faces!"

This feast was a feast like none before it, for Zoey and company. Everyone was in their Pjs, everyone except Zoey – who was wearing school robes – and Dobby in his suit. Everyone looked in bewilderment at Dobby at first, even after she explained he was her guest and friend.

Zoey didn't know whether the best bit was Justin hurrying over from the Hufflepuff table to wring her hand and apologize endlessly for suspecting them, or Hagrid turning up at half past three, cuffing Zoey and Ron so hard on the shoulders that they were knocked into their plates of trifle, Dobby's expressions of ecstasy every time he tried something new, or their four hundred fifty points for Gryffindor securing the House Cup for the second year running, or Professor McGonagall standing up to tell them all that the exams had been canceled as a school treat ("Oh, _no_!" said Hermione), or Dumbledore announcing that, unfortunately, Professor Lockhart would be unable to return next year, owing to the fact that he needed to go away and get his memory back. Quite a few of the teachers joined in the cheering that greeted this news.

"Shame," said Ron, helping himself to a jam doughnut. "He was starting to grow on me."

"Like a fungus!" Zoey said, giggling.

The rest of term passed quickly and brightly, in more ways than one. DADA classes were cancelled, leaving those spaces open to do whatever, and Lucius Malfoy had been sacked as a school governor. Draco looked severely put out by this, for some reason.

All too soon, for the second year in a row, they watched their friends and classmates take the thestral-drawn carriages down to the Hogwarts Express, staying behind for a week while they waited for Nicolas Flamel again. But Zoey was Out, and her response to boredom generally entailed a lot of mischief, so the week wouldn't be too bad. In fact, she already had some ideas brewing in her head. ...

End note: Future chapters may take a bit longer than usual, because I've been getting really annoyed with myself following the books so closely, but it was kinda necessary, seeing as there's not actually a lot going on in the first two books. I'm going to try to focus more on character development. I don't know how far afield I'll go; I don't want to go *too* far afield, as that makes things exponentially harder to write, but anyway, that's the gist of it.

End note 2: Thanks, everyone, for all the feedback! It makes writing these things worth it. Especially since funny stuff is always funnier when other people laugh at it, too. :-)


	13. Egypt

" **The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 13"**

 **By = Fayanora**

 **Chapter Thirteen:** **Egypt**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of _**Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ and _Zoey_ , and now **_**Iliana (bold, italic, and underlined)**_** _ _ **.**__ _(_ Which is also sometimes used for emphasis in Al's speech, but whatever.)

That one week they stayed in Hogwarts over the summer was much like the last one, largely boring while they waited for Nicolas Flamel to need Zoey to retrieve the Philosopher's Stone. The only really new things were feeding the basilisk, and Tier occasionally deciding to take over and run through the forbidden forest whenever he could sneak away during the day, or else running around the grounds. It was a little unsettling for some of the teachers, in fact, as he was getting better at changing the body to be more animal-like. He never managed to get it looking like a real animal, it always looked like some animal-human hybrid, but that probably just made it worse.

What kind of animal Tier attempted to change into depended on his mood, but usually a wolf, a dog, or occasionally a bear; or rather, part-human hybrids of those animals as he grew into his powers.

And then there were the times Tier just lengthened the arms and gave them wolf-like teeth, but otherwise kept the body human. That was perhaps the most unnerving of all Tier's transformations. But the teachers tolerated it because he wasn't hurting anyone, and because the others explained that Tier was just as intelligent as the rest of them, even though he didn't like to speak.

As to feeding the basilisk, they sent down piles of whole chickens or whole beef roasts every week, as that was pretty much all the basilisk wanted. They always enlisted the help of one or more of the house elves, warning the elves that they'd be speaking Parseltongue, and telling them not to go down there just in case. The first time they did this, the house elves – figuring out at once what the place was – had to be reassured several times that the basilisk wouldn't be coming up without their say-so, and they wouldn't say so unless it was a dire emergency. They only really calmed down when Al, getting annoyed, told them that Dumbledore knew about this arrangement and that they could confirm this with him if it helped.

He was reasonably certain they _did_ , in fact, check with Dumbledore. Which was fine by him; whatever eased their anxiety. But still, most of the time they would only take the food up to the door of the bathroom before leaving quick as a shot. This made things slightly more difficult, especially with Filch. Snape, on the other hand, seemed to give the place a wide berth. He suspected Dumbledore had told Snape what was going on, though he couldn't figure out why the abusive git needed to know.

Tier might have been another strain on the kitchens, if not for the fact that he was perfectly capable of hunting his own food. The others checked out whenever he did this, not wanting to watch as he broke the necks of rabbits or whatever he did when he caught them. Which was a shame, Tier thought, as he was just catching and releasing the animals without hurting them. (He needed to know he _could_ catch food if he needed to, but as Hogwarts gave them plenty of food, actually killing the animals would just be wasteful.)

Since they would be going to stay with the Weasleys for the rest of the summer, as they had before, they had to do a lot of diplomacy the last few days to convince the house elves to apparate food into the Chamber. It wasn't easy, despite the fact they knew the elves could do so without entering the Chamber itself. It was a combination of Zoey's youth and Iliana's compassion that finally convinced them to do it.

As to the cost of this arrangement, they'd tried offering Dumbledore money to pay for the extra food, but he refused them. They tried a couple more times just in case, but he refused all offers, insisting that the arrangement would be useful later.

At last, though, the week was over and they were heading down to Hogsmeade in a carriage, and were met at the station by Mr. Weasley.

"Ah, Harry, good to see you," he said, since Harry was the one fully Out at the moment. "How are you?"

"Doing well. How about you?"

"Oh, no complaints, no complaints. Anyway, Harry, we're going to go to the Burrow by side-along apparition. Have you ever done that before?"

"Yeah. Dumbledore took us to the Leaky Cauldron that way after Al let those snakes loose in the zoo."

"Good then, I don't have to explain it," Mr. Weasley said, holding out his arm.

"Just don't be surprised if we get sick from it," Harry warned.

"Thanks for the heads-up, Harry."

Harry took Mr. Weasley's arm, and when everyone was ready, Mr. Weasley apparated, taking him along for the ride.

Sure enough, when they got there, Harry bent over in the grass and was sick, while Mr. Weasley stepped aside to get away from the smell and the mess. When Harry was feeling better again, he followed Mr. Weasley on the surprisingly long walk to the front door.

"Ah yes, Dumbledore got some people he knows to put some extra protections on the Burrow while you're here, since trouble has a way of finding you. Dumbledore was very shaken up by that whole Chamber business. So was I, of course, but I've never seen Dumbledore shaken before."

Harry nodded, repressing a grin. He knew that Dumbledore's 'very shaken' was hard to spot. His estimation of Mr. Weasley raised some, knowing the man could read at least that much in Dumbledore's mannerisms. Of course, the man _did_ have a tendency to get pensive when he was worried. …

"Anyway, Harry, I must ask you and the others to stay in the house or yard while you're here, okay?"

"We will, Mr. Weasley."

"Harry!" Ron shouted, running to meet his friend.

"Ron!"

They hugged briefly, Harry noticing Ginny nearby, giving him a look that was hard to read, as it was filled with such mixed and muddled emotions. He nodded understandingly at her, once. She smiled nervously, then left the room unhurriedly.

Ron and Harry ran off to hang out and talk together, Harry telling Ron about his week at Hogwarts alone, leaving out the parts about the basilisk because he hadn't told Ron or Hermione yet, and was still trying to decide if it was wise to do so. But Ron was plenty entertained by the tales of Tier's exploits.

"...mind you, there's no proof he's hurting any animals, as we don't see or feel any blood, feathers, or fur when we snap out of it again, but just the fact that he's hunting them is kind of weird," Harry said.

"Wow, I bet."

They felt annoyance from Tier then, and an image of him catching and releasing the animals.

"Oh. Okay, according to Tier, he just catches and releases them without hurting them. Well that's a relief."

"Did he talk to you, then?"

"No. Not in words, anyway. Even inside our head, he doesn't use words unless there's no other way."

"But he's just as intelligent as the rest of you?"

"Yeah. It's a little odd, but hey, whatever. We're odd in many ways already, what's one more thing?"

The weeks at the Burrow went by as usual, with the kind of happy speed that came from living with people that liked you, people that loved each other, people that fed you well and treated you well. The kind of home they would have loved to have had for the first 12 years of their life. Mostly it was Harry, but Iliana and Zoey made occasional appearances. And once Al startled Mrs. Weasley so bad she almost dropped what she was carrying, though he hadn't been doing anything but sitting there. But then, adults were always weird around him for some reason, more so than any of the others except maybe Tier. But feeling weird about Tier was understandable, whereas Al couldn't figure out why his appearance always made most of the adults he knew uncomfortable. Nor why the looks would increase in intensity when he laughed.

The only really significant change was that Ginny, who was more nervous around Harry than ever before, was opening up to Iliana on the days that she was Out. It was tentative at first, which was understandable given what happened the last time she trusted someone, but progress was being made; the two girls were becoming friends.

"You know, Ginny, I think maybe you should see a Mind Healer, too," Iliana told her one of those times. "I don't know if Healer Young could do it or not, but he could probably find someone who can if not."

Ginny crossed her arms uncomfortably. "Yeah, I guess."

"Okay. Do you want me to ask him, or do you want to do it?"

"Can... can we do it together?" she asked in a small voice.

"We can do that, yes."

So, when Healer Young came to visit her the next time, Iliana held Ginny's hand in the private room they met him in. But as soon as Healer Young came into the room, Ginny took a deep breath and blurted out her needs.

"I need a Mind Healer."

Healer Young paused, then sat down, and nodded. "I heard from Dumbledore about You-Know-Who using you to get into the Chamber. I have time, after Iliana's session, to have a session with you, if you're ready for that."

Ginny looked pleased by this, but then her face fell as she thought of something.

"Ohmygoodness... um, I just remembered my parents can't pay you."

He waved her concern away. "It's alright, Miss Weasley. Given my work with Iliana, and given what happened over the last school year, Dumbledore has hired me on as a school Mind Healer. The school will pay for our sessions. I'm already seeing some other students because of this Chamber business."

Ginny relaxed. "Oh. Good. Well, thank you."

"You're welcome, dear," he said with a kind smile.

Ginny got up and left the room for Iliana to have her session.

On Thursday the 22nd of July, everything changed for the better in a wildly unexpected way. The day after Percy got a letter telling him that he'd made Head Boy at Hogwarts, Mr. Weasley came running into the house hollering and whooping and waving a parchment around in people's faces. It took a few minutes for him to calm down enough to tell them what he was so excited about.

"We won! We won!"

"What did we win, Arthur?"

"The annual Daily Prophet Grand Prize Galleon Draw! Seven hundred galleons!"

At this, everyone in the family was excited, dancing around. Fred and George did a little jig with one another, and even Harry laughed with joy; if anyone deserved 700 galleons, it was the Weasleys.

 _Let's see,_ Iliana thought at him, _that's... a little over £2100._

"Oh Ronnie," Mrs. Weasley said, hugging Ron, "we can afford a new wand for you, now."

Ron whooped at this news. Harry privately thought they would've had to buy him a new wand anyway, seeing as his old one was in two separate pieces now, after it exploded in the Chamber of Secrets.

"This calls for a trip to visit Bill," Mr. Weasley said.

"Yes, that's perfect, dear. Oh, so much planning to do!" she bustled off to start.

Harry tried to keep his smile on, but was struggling. Where would he go while this happened? Back to Hogwarts?

"Harry!" Mr. Weasley said, spotting him. "I'll have to ask Dumbledore, of course, but if we can, we'll take you with us."

Harry's eyes went wide. "Take me with you? To Egypt? Wow! Thanks, Mr. Weasley."

"Well don't thank me yet, I still have to ask Dumbledore."

Mr. Weasley rushed off, whistling happily to himself, to write a letter to send to Dumbledore.

Harry, too, rushed off to write a letter, to inform Hermione of what they were going to do, though he wasn't going to send it until they heard back for sure about being able to go. He also wrote one to send to Hagrid, so Hagrid would know where to send a birthday gift.

In the end, they got permission from Dumbledore to go, though he sent them some sunblock along with the permission letter.

As was usual for the Weasleys, packing ahead of time didn't really help much. They all still ran around like mad on the day of the portkey to Egypt, going back several times for things before finally getting to drive to the nearest local portkey office, and were just barely on time when they finally got there.

The portkey was a piece of sandstone, so it would blend in when it was discarded in Egypt, without littering the place with garbage; they would have to take a different portkey back home. Under Mrs. Weasley's direction, Harry grabbed part of the sandstone, as did all the Weasleys, and waited. Then they counted down, and at one, there was a jerk behind his navel, a swirl of colors and wind, and then they fell over.

As he struggled to stand back up, he said, "Why does magical transportation always suck?"

"Ten past four from Ottery St. Catchpole, UK," a very careful, well-enunciated voice said. Harry looked up; a tall, bronze skinned man with eyes like polished petrified wood and with shiny black hair was standing there, welcoming them all to Egypt. Harry and Iliana both felt the same thing for this man, the same kind of feeling Iliana had once felt for Oliver Wood. Harry blinked, and blushed. Then he tried very hard to look away inconspicuously and to try to put these feelings out of his mind.

They got put up in a hotel with its name in both English and Arabic. The English version said 'The Pink Sphinx,' and had a very time-worn wood carving of a pink sphinx under the sign. Another sign said 'Proudly serving the magical community since 1746 A.D.'

Like the Leaky Cauldron, it was also a pub. Unlike the Leaky Cauldron, it was brighter, more colorful, and had matching customers. They didn't know what stone was used to make it, but it was sand colored, so maybe sandstone? And there was, also, sand everywhere; it was blowing in from the outside.

Al frowned internally at the sight.

 _ **Why is it the wizarding world is always so behind the Muggle world? This place is like a bad stereotype of Victorian-era Egypt. I very much doubt Muggle Egypt looks like this.**_

They got set up in their rooms, and came back down for dinner. It was, as usual for a Weasley dinner, a noisy affair, with lots of talking, when people weren't stuffing their faces. The inn's fare wasn't as good as Mrs. Weasley's cooking of course, but it was good. Harry had something called _Ful Medames_ , which was a kind of spicy bean dish served with vegetables and sliced hard-boiled eggs. There were also plates of a pita bread called _Eish Masri_ , and tureens of hummus. It was all very delicious.

 _This is amazing,_ Harry said to his headmates. _The Dursleys would never have let us do this._

 _ **Yeah**_ , Al said. _**Those idiots would never eat anything they perceived as 'foreign.'**_

 _And even if they did, they never would have let us go with them._

The month was largely a flurry of activity, so fun it went by very fast. They saw the sights, of course; they saw the pyramids and the great stone sphinx that was famous even in the Muggle world. They saw the tombs of wizarding kings and other important wizarding folk, with mutated skeletons of unfortunate people who had tried breaking in.

They met Bill, too, of course. That was an interesting experience. They'd been anticipating someone like Percy, but Bill was... cool. He was tall, with long hair that he had tied back in a ponytail. He was wearing an earring with what looked like a fang dangling from it. Bill's clothes would not have looked out of place at a rock concert, except that Harry recognized his boots to be made, not of leather, but of dragon hide.

 _ **I guess that fits his job of curse-breaker, anyway**_ , Al thought.

On seeing Bill, though, Iliana and Harry once more felt that feeling that Harry didn't want to think about, that Iliana had felt once for Oliver Wood. But the worst part of it was, he knew what it felt like to feel the emotions of a headmate, emotions he didn't share, and this wasn't that. He was feeling the same thing she was, all on his own.

As if that wasn't bad enough, while Harry was determined to stay away from Bill, Iliana was equally determined to find more reason to get closer to the eldest Weasley brother. This made Harry so uncomfortable that he switched places with her, showing Bill their transformation ability for the first time ever.

Harry did attempt to stay Out as much as possible, though, and the others honored his wishes. So he saw all of the really cool stuff with his own eyes, and in full control of his own body. Which is how he was when he found something he thought he'd never see again.

They were in the wizarding district of Cairo when it happened, shopping for souvenirs. They turned down the wrong way, and found a less-than-savory shop down a dark alley, that reminded them strongly of Borgin and Burke's. And there, in the window, was...

 _ **Is that the Mirror of Erised? How did that get here?**_

Reading the text above the mirror, it was confirmed as the Mirror of Erised. Harry took a closer look, stepping forward. Suddenly, he saw his mom and dad, and scores of other relatives standing behind him. Only this time, he wasn't Iliana, nor any of the others. He wasn't even entirely himself, either. The reflection of himself in the mirror was older, taller, and... he blinked in bewilderment.

 _ **You're a girl! It's showing you as a girl. But it's you for sure. Same face, same eyes, same color hair, just longer and tamer. And, well, then there's your chest.**_

Al was right; Harry's reflection in the Mirror of Erised was a girl version of himself, age 16 or 17, and had breasts. They were neither too large nor too small, but they were unmistakable.

His emotions ground to a halt, like there was sticky tar in their gears. He felt numb at first, then numb and excited at the same time. Then things that had confused him in the past suddenly made sense. All of a sudden, his emotions re-engaged, going into overdrive, and he couldn't tolerate the chaotic mix of emotions swirling through him like a hurricane; he ran full tilt away from the Mirror, trying to run from his feelings. He crashed right into Ron, and both of them fell over.

"Oy, watch it! Harry? What's the matter?"

Harry refused to cry in front of his friend. But there was nowhere to run to, either. Well... there was one place. He retreated within himself, and in his place appeared Iliana.

"What happened to Harry?" Ron asked her.

"Oh... um... I don't know," she lied.

Harry didn't come back out for the rest of the trip, something that everyone noticed but few seemed to want to comment on. He didn't even come out to see the news clipping of the photo he was in with the rest of the Weasleys, from the Daily Prophet, a clipping that Ron sent a copy of to Hermione, who was vacationing with her parents in the south of France. Nor did he come out to receive a gift from Ron, a Pocket Sneakoscope he'd bought in wizarding Cairo; Iliana had to put it away in their trunk for him.

Even when they got back to the UK, and went to Diagon Alley, Harry was still hiding within. Iliana watched Ron get a brand-new wand at Olivander's, and later met Hermione.

The three of them shopped around for school supplies and other things. Iliana got some Sleakeazy's hair potion for Harry at one store, then followed the other two into a magical pet store, because Ron's rat Scabbers was ill.

As she listened to the conversation between Ron and the woman behind the counter, her eyes went wide at finding out Scabbers was 12 years old. It was very interesting to her that magical pets lived longer than non-magical pets, but made sense. Still, if Scabbers was magical, he'd never shown any sign of having any powers. He just ate and slept all the time. Or he had, until recently. Now he looked very anxious. The anxiety, in fact, radiated from him so strongly that it was almost like he was human; they'd certainly never had any ability to read animal emotions before then.

She debated whether or not to tell Ron about this. They'd not mentioned it yet, but Al's heart-reading power and their effort to learn human body language had combined and mutated over the summer, and was giving them the ability to feel the emotions of other people without trying. It was very useful, but it was also sometimes annoying, because it was getting harder and harder to shut off, and sometimes made it hard to be around other people. She really hoped that being able to read Scabbers the same way was an aberration; she didn't think she could handle it if their new empathic power expanded to include all animals everywhere, even if it just stayed restricted to mammals and/or birds.

Making things worse for her, Hermione had used her pocket money to buy herself a pet cat that attacked Scabbers the first time it saw him, making things between Ron and Hermione tense and angry, which were emotions that hurt more to be around than others. Added to that, they could also sense the cat's emotions, though the cat's emotions were far weaker than Scabbers's emotions.

Still, Iliana's eye managed to get caught by something in Quality Quidditch Supplies on their way back. It was a shining, perfect, gorgeous broomstick called the Firebolt. It was truly magnificent, a work of art, but as soon as she saw the sign saying 'price on request,' she started walking away. Normal broomsticks were expensive enough – she should know, as she had bought new brooms for three of the Hogwarts Houses last year. She didn't want to think how much the Firebolt cost. Especially since she had her own broomstick already.

After they got back from Diagon Alley and put their things away, Iliana noticed her Hogwarts letter again, in particular a permission slip for going to Hogsmeade, to be signed by a parent or guardian. Since she was no longer with the Dursleys, she wondered who she'd have to ask to get permission now.

Shrugging, she put it aside for later and went downstairs to meet up with the others again. Then, spotting something, she went over to Mr. Weasley, who was reading The Daily Prophet, which had a picture of a sunken-eyed, long-haired escaped prisoner named Sirius Black on the front page. The man looked like a vampire. A very depressed and underfed vampire.

"Did that man always look that way, or is that what Azkaban does to people?" she asked Mr. Weasley.

Mr. Weasley looked at the picture, and she felt waves of apprehension and discomfort come from the man. She hadn't been looking at him when she felt it; she looked up at him to see if the new empathic power was accurate, and the body language confirmed this.

"Er, well..." Mr. Weasley said uncomfortably, "in fact, Sirius Black did, well... did look much more, well... better, before Azkaban," Mr. Weasley said. "He used to be considered quite, well... handsome. But yes, Azkaban tends to have long-term effects on appearance. Dementors – you know, the Azkaban guards? - they're the reason for that."

"Dementors," she said. "I wonder if they're listed in that book Hagrid sent us for our birthday?"

Ron snorted. "Doubt we'll ever find out. Those monster books bite you if you try to even pick them up."

"Oh well, good thing I picked up some extra books, including 'Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them' by Newt Scamander.

"By the way, Mr. Weasley," she continued. "What's Sirius Black's picture doing on there, anyway?"

"Well, he... he escaped."

Ron goggled at his father. "What? Escaped? From _Azkaban?_ You're having us on!"

"No. I'm being quite serious. Er, about Sirius. Nobody knows how he did it, either. Being around dementors too long is supposed to drain a wizard of their powers, and he was in there for 12 years."

Iliana's eyes narrowed a little.

"What was he in prison _for_?"

"He was a Death Eater. One of-"

"Moldywart's lot, yeah, we know. Do you think he's going to rejoin his master?"

"Er... well, yes, I think so. Eventually."

She raised an eyebrow.

"Well, you know, he has to... to get out of the country first. And no matter how he got out of Azkaban, he won't manage to do _that_ so easily."

 _ **He's lying,**_ Al told her, unnecessarily; she already knew.

She waited until Ron wandered off to do something before she spoke to Mr. Weasley again.

"Sirius Black is out to kill us, isn't he?"

He hadn't been drinking or eating anything, and yet somehow Mr. Weasley still managed to choke at these words, coughing for several minutes. She waited for him to recover.

"How did you know?" he finally asked her.

She sighed, and began explaining all about Al's heart-reading, its limitations, and how their attempts to bypass those limitations resulted in an empathic sense, and the ability to tell when someone was lying.

"...then we picked up on your emotions – discomfort, unease, protectiveness, fear, and a dash of confusion, all focused around us. From there, it wasn't difficult to guess."

"You are... quite perceptive."

He pulled her aside to a quiet alcove.

"Molly doesn't want me telling you this, but since you already figured it out, I should probably fill you in more. In the days before his escape, Black was heard to mutter in his sleep, always the same words: 'He's at Hogwarts.' Harry was recently in the paper, and the Minister of Magic recalled having given Black a copy of that paper at Black's request, so it wasn't difficult to make the connection."

"You're still holding something back. Something big. I can tell. If it's as big as I think it is, you'd better tell us now. The longer you wait, the worse it will be when we find out later. I don't know how well you know Al, but he has a temper problem. Whatever it is, it's better if you tell us now."

"I... well, I... there's nothing really to tell."

She sighed.

"Listen, lying to us is pointless. We can tell. And we can get the basic shape of the truth from your emotions. I understand you don't want to tell us, because it's something huge. But I'm telling you, from experience, that it'll be far safer if you-"

"Arthur!" Mrs. Weasley interrupted. "What are you doing back there with Iliana? You're not breaking your promise, are you?"

"N-no, dear, honest! Sh-"

"I figured it out on my own, Mrs. Weasley," she said, rubbing her forehead in pain at the intensity of the Weasley matriarch's anger. "I was just trying to wheedle some more information out of him."

"Well you come out here at once," the older woman said, grabbing her and pulling her out by her arm. "There's no point in knowing things that will just upset-"

"Damn it, woman!" Iliana shouted, pulling out of her grip and transforming into Alastair.

"I know you mean well," Al continued, "but we're tired of being treated like toddlers. We're not fragile little crybabies. We've faced Voldemort twice already and came out victorious, and Black can't be any worse than _him_ , can he?

"What's more, we put up with all kinds of emotional abuse and neglect for most our lifetime. But what we always hated more than the abuse and the neglect was the lying! We are so SICK of being lied to! You were going to lie by omission about Black trying to kill us, which would have left us vulnerable to attack, and now there's something else you're holding back about him, something big, and you'd better tell us what it is NOW, or so help me, I don't know what I'll do, but it won't be pretty. Well?"

"No. I'm sorry, Alastair, but school is tomorrow, and you need your sleep. You're just going to have to cool down and accept that we have your best interests at heart."

Al could sense, even without the new empathic gift, that she was not going to budge on this. She hadn't heard a word he'd said, or else had given it no mind. It was just so... so _adult_ of her. That's what adults _did_ , apparently: keep secrets, lie, and treat children like house elves.

"Fine," he said, with deadly calm. "Fine. I'm going to go find out how to write howlers, so that when I _do_ find out what you're hiding, I can send you a few _dozen."_

Then he stormed out of the room with as much dignity as he could muster.

When Ron returned to their room later, Tier had come out in Al's place. Ron opened the door, and was met with the sight of a slightly changed version of Al's body as Tier was chewing vigorously on some rawhide. Ron paused, goggling at this sight, then sighed, rolled his eyes, and left the room again.

Iliana was back the next morning as they rushed around to get their stuff together, though by her behavior she was no more happy with Mr. and Mrs. Weasley than Al had been, glaring frequently at them, for their empathic sense had told her that the two adults weren't going to tell her any more. She didn't know who to be more angry with, Mrs. Weasley for being so difficult, or Mr. Weasley for being such a pushover. Granted, Mrs. Weasley could probably stare down a chimera and make the chimera meekly stand down, so maybe Mr. Weasley just knew better than to waste time trying to out-stubborn his wife.

She was unsurprised when the Ministry provided them cars to go to King's Cross station, given what Black had escaped for. Not wanting to upset Ginny, she didn't tell anyone that she knew why they were there. She could tell Ron and Hermione later. Though she did let Ron know that she needed to tell them something, later.

As usual, they were late, and got on the train at the last possible moment. So, naturally, all the compartments were full, save for one, which had two people in it. One of them was an adult, who was shabby and asleep, his battered briefcase held together with a lot of knotted string. This took them by surprise; the only adult they'd ever seen on the train before was the woman who sold snacks on the trolley.

The other person was at least equally strange, a blond girl with straggly, waist-length hair, and very protruberant eyes, like she was constantly surprised. She had her wand behind her ear, and was reading a magazine.

"Let's find somewhere else, mate," Ron said.

"There isn't anywhere else, Ron." Hermione said. "Iliana and I have already checked."

"Um, hi," Iliana said to the blonde girl. "Is it okay if we sit here?"

Silently, the girl looked at her, considering. Then she nodded.

"Thanks," Iliana said, sitting across from the girl, on the man's left side.

Hermione sat down next to the girl, and Ron sat on Iliana's left.

There was a tense silence at first, Iliana not sure how to proceed. Then Ron whispered to her.

"Who d'ya suppose the bloke is?"

Somehow, Hermione heard him. "He's Professor R. J. Lupin."

"How is it you know that?"

"It's written on his case, Ronald."

Sure enough, in peeling gold letters, was the exact name Hermione had said.

"You're Iliana Potter," the blonde girl said without preamble, in a dreamy voice.

"Uh... yeah, I am. Sorry I didn't introduce myself. Who're you?"

"Oh, I'm Luna Lovegood."

Ron blinked. "Lovegood? Wait, do you live in Ottery St. Catchpole?"

Luna nodded.

"I've heard Dad mention the Lovegoods before. I'm Ron Weasley."

"And I'm Hermione Granger."

Iliana cocked her head curiously at Luna. Most people she'd run into since developing the empathic gift were a riot of emotions as various thoughts drove through their brain like Muggle traffic, but Luna was the most soothing person to be around thus far, with emotions like a sunlit cloud, or sunlit mist; bright but calming, languid. Like she was floating gently on a raft down a river, and everything around her was the shore as she passed it.

"Oy, Iliana," Ron said, shaking her.

"What! What?" Iliana looked around. "What's going on?"

"You were just staring at Luna, your eyes half closed, looking like you were about to fall asleep."

"Wha... Oh?"

"Yeah. What's that about?"

"She's an empath," Luna said, brightening.

Everyone stared at her.

"A what?"

"An empath. She can feel people's emotions."

"What? No she isn't. Are you?"

"Um... yes, I am."

"Since when?"

Iliana sighed. Then she calmly went about explaining about Al's heart-reading sense and how it had evolved into the ability to feel the emotions of others.

"Most people's emotions are... noisy. But Luna's... Luna's emotions are like drifting serenely down a river. I guess I was getting lulled by them."

Ron turned to Luna. "How did you know she's an empath?"

"I've met empaths before. They always love my energy; it soothes them. I recognized the symptoms of someone getting pulled into my emotions."

Iliana turned to look at the still-sleeping Professor Lupin.

"Yeah, and then he's here adding to it. The poor man is exhausted, even in his sleep. Between his exhaustion and Luna's serenity, I..." she trailed off, yawning, but shook herself awake.

"So, Luna," Hermione said. "I haven't seen you before, I don't think. Are you new?"

"Oh, no. I'm a second year. And in Ravenclaw. 'Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure,'" she quoted in a singsong voice.

Then she lifted her magazine up and continued reading. Iliana sensed she was just... not shy, exactly, just... introverted; had to take socialization in little bits.

With Luna quiet again, the others looked around for more conversation.

"I wonder what this Lupin bloke teaches," Ron said.

"Defense Against the Dark Arts is the only opening, as far as I know," Iliana said.

"Oh yeah, that makes sense. I hope he's up to it. Looks like one good hex would finish him off. Anyway," he turned to Iliana, "you said earlier you needed to tell us something. Is it something you can tell us now, or should we wait?"

Iliana considered Luna for a moment, then turned back to Ron.

"I can tell you here, I think."

She proceeded to tell them about how she'd figured out Sirius Black escaped to kill them, and how they'd gotten confirmation from Mr. Weasley. Ron looked dumbfounded, and Hermione looked scared, with her hands over her mouth. Finally, though, she lowered them to speak.

"Sirius Black escaped Azkaban to come after you, Iliana? Oh, you'll have to be really, really careful. Don't go looking for trouble."

"We don't usually go looking for trouble. Trouble usually finds us just fine on its own."

They talked about Sirius Black for a few more minutes before Ron interrupted.

"What's that noise?"

A faint, tinny sort of whistle was coming from somewhere. They looked all around the compartment. They finally tracked it down to Iliana's trunk. Ron stood up and retrieved the noisemaker from the trunk, which turned out to be the Pocket Sneakoscope Ron had gifted them. It was spinning very fast in the palm of Ron's hand and glowing brilliantly.

"Is that a _Sneakoscope_?" said Hermione interestedly, standing up for a better look.

"Yeah … mind you, it's a very cheap one," Ron said. "It went off that night at dinner. Of course, that could be because Fred and George were putting beetles in Percy's soup."

"Put it away again, we don't want to wake him. Plus it hurts my ears," Iliana said.

Ron nodded, wadding it into a set of robes and returning it to the trunk. The noise was gone at last.

Ron mentioned getting it fixed in Hogsmeade, which set him and Hermione to discussing the all-wizarding village and all the cool things in it. Reminded of the permission slip, Iliana eventually cut in.

"Sounds great. But, well... I don't know who's supposed to sign mine, now we're not with the Dursleys anymore. And with Sirius Black on the loose and gunning for me, I doubt whoever it is will say yes."

"What? Blimey, I hadn't considered that. Well you're a ward of Hogwarts now, right? So that means Dumbledore, probably."

"Yeah, I guess so."

"But Professor McGonagall is our head of House, Ron," Hermione said. "What if they have to get it signed by her?"

Iliana gave a hollow laugh. "I hope not. Because in the current climate, the odds of McGonagall signing it are basically zero."

"— or we can ask Fred and George, they know every secret passage out of the castle —"

"Ron!" said Hermione sharply. "They shouldn't be sneaking out with Black on the loose."

"Which is probably what McGonagall will say."

"Don't worry, Iliana," Luna said in her usual dreamy voice. "If you can't go to Hogsmeade, you can spend time with me instead."

Ron snorted a little, but Iliana smiled thankfully.

"Thanks, Luna. Good to know I won't be bored to tears in that case. Oh, and do you know Ginny Weasley?"

Luna nodded. "She's nice to me sometimes. Though she was often very worried last year."

"Ah, yes. Well, she should be better this year. Anyway, I suppose she could always join us."

"Yeah, if you're you, or Al, or Zoey. If you're Harry, though, she'll turn beet red and run off. She still likes him, you know?"

Iliana ignored him, and stood up to retrieve a book. She could feel everyone on the train with her empathic gift, and the pressure of everyone's emotions was getting harder to ignore. In fact, it was giving her a headache.

For half an hour, she struggled to try to read her Newt Scamander book, but between the empathic noise and Ron and Hermione having a spat after Hermione let Crookshanks out of his cage, and he attacked Scabbers, she had to put the book aside to massage her head.

"Iliana?" Luna said. "Would you like to get lost in my energy?"

"Yes please," she said, looking up at Luna, and into the blonde's eyes.

Immediately, the empathic noise softened. After a few minutes, the noise stopped altogether. She could hear nothing at all, and felt _so_ serene. Her headache began to wane; it was still there, it just felt distant, detached from her. Some part of her mind lazily made a note to get a headache cure from the Hospital Wing later. She felt Ron poke her, several times, at some point, and ignored him.

Then, abruptly, she snapped out of her daze. It took her a moment to figure out why; Malfoy and his cronies had appeared, and Ron had shaken her awake. But whatever Malfoy had come to be a bother about, it was over soon, as he spotted Professor Lupin, and immediately took off.

She looked down at her hand, and found she was holding a stack of Cauldron Cakes.

"What the heck?"

"Oh, that," Ron said. "I poked you earlier, to ask if you wanted anything. You just pulled some gold out of your pocket and handed it to me without speaking, so I got you some Cauldron Cakes, a few Chocolate Frogs, and some Bertie Botts. Er... you're not upset about that, are you?"

"No, that's fine. I _am_ hungry, now you mention it."

She ate all of the cakes, and two of the three Chocolate Frogs, then went back to getting lost in Luna's energy, pausing just long enough before she did to notice that the weather outside the train was _horrible,_ dark with lots of rain.

Some time later, Ron shook her back to reality again.

"Are we there yet?"

"We don't know. The train stopped. But Hermione says we can't be there yet, and I trust her judgment."

Iliana sighed, and got up to poke her head out the compartment door. She saw she was one of many people with the same idea.

Without warning, all the lamps went out and they were plunged into total darkness.

"What's going on?" said Ron's voice from behind Iliana.

"Ouch!" gasped Hermione. "Ron, that was my foot!"

Iliana groped in the dark back to her seat.

"D'you think we've broken down?"

"Dunno …"

There was a squeaking sound, and Iliana saw the dim black outline of Ron, wiping a patch clean on the window and peering out.

"There's something moving out there," Ron said. "I think people are coming aboard."

The compartment door suddenly opened and someone fell painfully over Iliana's legs.

"Sorry — d'you know what's going on? — Ouch — sorry —"

"Hullo, Neville," said Iliana, feeling around in the dark and pulling Neville up by his cloak.

"Iliana? Is that you? What's happening?"

"No idea — sit down —"

There was a loud hissing and a yelp of pain; Neville had tried to sit on Crookshanks.

"I'm going to go and ask the driver what's going on," came Hermione's voice. Iliana felt the girl pass her, heard the door slide open again, and then a thud and two loud squeals of pain.

"Who's that?"

"Who's _that_?"

"Ginny?"

"Hermione?"

"What are you doing?"

"I was looking for Ron —"

"Come in and sit down —"

"Not here!" said Iliana hurriedly. " _I'm_ here!"

"Ouch!" said Neville.

"Quiet!" said a hoarse voice suddenly.

Professor Lupin appeared to have woken up at last. Iliana could hear movements in his corner. None of them spoke.

With a crackling noise and a flare of light, Professor Lupin conjured a magical fire-like light into his hand, which filled the compartment with shivering orange light. The light showed his face, gray and weary, but also alert and wary.

Iliana felt sick all of a sudden, as a wave of cold terror washed through the people on the train. "Professor Lupin... everyone's terrified! But not of the dark... something _in_ the dark..."

"I don't doubt that. Stay where you are," he said in the same hoarse voice, and he got slowly to his feet with his handful of fire held out in front of him.

But the door slid slowly open before Lupin could reach it.

Standing in the doorway, illuminated by the shivering flames in Lupin's hand, was a cloaked figure that towered to the ceiling. Its face was completely hidden beneath its hood. But worse yet, it felt... Wrong. Unnatural. It felt like the empathic equivalent of a dark hole full of rotten, maggot-riddled meat. She knew instinctively she had to get away from it at once, but it was blocking the doorway.

Then she saw its hand, like the corpse of a drowning victim, glistening, grayish, slimy and scabbed. This was only visible for a moment, for it withdrew the hand back into its cloak, as though her eyes on its flesh burned it.

And then the thing beneath the hood, whatever it was, drew a long, slow, rattling breath, as though it were trying to suck something more than air from its surroundings.

An intense cold swept over them all. Iliana felt her own breath catch in her chest. The cold went deeper than her skin. It was inside her chest, it was inside her very heart.

Her eyes rolled up into her head. She couldn't see. She was drowning in cold. There was a rushing in her ears as though of water. She was being dragged downward, the roaring growing louder …

And then, from far away, she heard screaming; terrible, terrified, pleading screams. She wanted to help whoever it was, she tried to move her arms, but couldn't … a thick white fog was swirling around her, inside her —

"Iliana! Iliana! Are you alright?"

Someone was slapping her face. She was on the ground, face parallel with the ground, and she smelled vomit. She _tasted_ vomit.

"W — what?"

Iliana opened her eyes. The lights were back on, and the train was moving again. She had apparently slid out of her seat and puked on the ground, but Professor Lupin had Vanished the sick.

She turned up toward the ceiling. Hermione and Ron were kneeling in concern over her. So were Neville, Luna, and Professor Lupin.

Professor Lupin helped her sit up, then gave her a cup of water and an empty cup to spit into, to wash out the taste of the sick. She felt weak, shaky, and was drenched in cold sweat.

"Are you okay?" Ron asked nervously.

"I... I don't know. What was that hooded thing? It was like... if nightmares had nightmares, that thing would be made of those. And who was screaming?"

"No one screamed," said Ron, more nervously still.

Iliana looked around at the others. Ginny and Neville looked back at her, both very pale. Luna – calm, serene, unflappable Luna – looked as though she'd been crying, her eyes puffy and red. She was also very pale.

"But I heard screaming —"

A loud snap made them all jump. Professor Lupin was breaking an enormous slab of chocolate into pieces.

"Here," he said to Iliana, handing her a particularly large piece. "Eat it. It'll help."

She looked at the chocolate. Things started to click into place for her.

"Was that a dementor?" she asked.

"Yes, it was. One of the dementors of Azkaban."

She turned even more pale.

"No wonder Hagrid was so scared of that place," she said.

Professor Lupin crumpled up the empty chocolate wrapper and put it in his pocket.

"Eat," he repeated. "It'll help. I need to speak to the driver, excuse me."

He strolled past her out into the corridor, and disappeared.

Remembering something she'd read in the Fantastic Beasts book about dementors, she bit into the chocolate. She felt much better at this. Perhaps sensing this, the others followed suit.

"So what happened?"

In fits and starts, Iliana got the story from the others in the compartment. The dementor had come in, looked around. Iliana had gone rigid in her seat, twitching, and retching. Lupin had told the dementor to go away, but it didn't do so until he shot something silvery at it. Then they described how the dementor made them feel; cold, hopeless, doomed to misery, unable to have a single happy thought. But nobody else had fallen off their seats, or had a fit, or lost their lunch. Nobody had heard screaming. Just her.

Only, it wasn't just her. The Collective was a mess, inside; Zoey was still crying, Al was doing the emotional equivalent of putting his knees under his chin and rocking back and forth, Tier had apparently retreated as far into the depths of their subconscious as he could, and Harry was holding onto Zoey, as much for his own comfort as hers.

Professor Lupin came back.

"Ah, you're eating the chocolate. Good. Do you feel better, Iliana?"

"Yes. Still shaken, though. Everyone else in the collective is pretty shaken up, too."

"I don't doubt it. What about Harry?"

"Comforting Zoey. Or, well, holding onto her for his own comfort, too."

They didn't talk much during the remainder of the journey. At long last, the train stopped at Hogsmeade station, and there was a great scramble to get outside; owls hooted, cats meowed, and Neville's pet toad croaked loudly from under his hat. It was freezing on the tiny platform; rain was driving down in icy sheets.

They heard Hagrid's familiar cry for the first years to follow him. Luna and Neville and Ginny came with them, and the six of them got a carriage together Iliana carrying Aqua in one cage, and Hedwig in another.

When Luna first saw the carriages, she squeaked in alarm. Iliana looked at her in concern.

"What's wrong?"

She pointed at a thestral. "What are those?" Strangely, she sounded more curious than afraid.

"It's a thestral. They're harmless. I can see them too, Luna."

"Really?"

"Really truly. The carriages are drawn by thestrals. Hagrid told me about them. They're scary looking if you can see them, but they're harmless and gentle."

"How come you and I can see them, and the others can't?" Luna asked.

"I can," said Neville.

"The only people who can see them are people who have seen..." Iliana's voice caught in her throat. "Who have seen someone die."

"Oh," said Luna simply. "That explains it."

Luna nodded, then got in the carriage as though absolutely nothing was the matter. Ron was a little harder to convince. But before long, they were all in the carriage and on their way up to the castle.

As the carriage passed through the entryway of the school, which was flanked by a pair of dementors, Iliana felt more of that cold sickness threaten to overtake them. But Tier came back, then, and without making any transformations, bolstered her resolve and hissed softly aloud in defiance.

When they finally disembarked the carriage, she heard a familiar drawling voice again.

"I heard you _fainted_ on the train, Potter, is that true?"

Tier still being in control of her body, Malfoy was treated to her hissing at him like an angry cat, which just made him laugh.

 _ **Let me try,**_ Al said, taking the reins.

 _'I AM THE WALRUS, COO COO CACHOO!'_ Al hissed in Parseltongue. Malfoy and his goons took off running in terror.

But Iliana sensed more than just Malfoy's fear. She looked around. Ginny was feeling uncomfortable, as was Neville. Professor Lupin, too, had frozen in his tracks, staring at her.

"Um... sorry about that."

Ginny shuddered, then sighed. "No, I know you're alright. Just... it reminds me of last year."

"I'll talk with Al about it, as he was the one who took control to do it. Sorry, again."

Ginny simply nodded. Neville looked a little more relaxed than he had.

Hermione prodded Ron in the back to make him hurry, and the four of them joined the crowd swarming up the steps, through the giant oak front doors, into the cavernous entrance hall, which was lit with flaming torches, and housed a magnificent marble staircase that led to the upper floors.

The door into the Great Hall stood open at the right; Iliana followed the crowd toward it, but had barely glimpsed the enchanted ceiling, which was black and cloudy tonight, when a voice called, "Potter! Granger! I want to see you both!"

Iliana and Hermione turned around, surprised. Professor McGonagall, Transfiguration teacher and head of Gryffindor House, was calling over the heads of the crowd. She was a stern-looking witch who wore her hair in a tight bun; her sharp eyes were framed with square spectacles. Iliana fought her way over to the woman with a feeling of foreboding: Professor McGonagall had a way of making her feel she must have done something wrong.

"There's no need to look so worried — I just want a word in my office," she told them. "Move along there, Weasley."

They followed her to her office as Ron and Luna went on without them.

Once they were in her office, a small room with a large, welcoming fire, Professor McGonagall motioned Iliana and Hermione to sit down. She settled herself behind her desk and said abruptly, "Professor Lupin sent an owl ahead to say that you were taken ill on the train, Potter."

Before Iliana could reply, there was a soft knock on the door and Madam Pomfrey, the nurse, came bustling in.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" said Madam Pomfrey, ignoring this and bending down to stare closely at her. "I suppose you've been doing something dangerous again?"

"It was a dementor, Poppy," said Professor McGonagall.

They exchanged a dark look, and Madam Pomfrey clucked disapprovingly.

"Setting dementors around a school," she muttered, pushing back Iliana's red hair and feeling her forehead. "She won't be the last one who collapses. Yes, she's all clammy. Terrible things, they are, and the effect they have on people who are already delicate —"

"Excuse me? I am _not_ delicate."

"Of course you're not," said Madam Pomfrey absentmindedly, now taking her pulse.

"I don't need anything," Iliana said. "Professor Lupin already gave us all chocolate on the train. And that's the counter for dementors, isn't it?"

"Well, glad to see we finally have a Defense teacher who knows his remedies, at least," the matron said approvingly.

"Are you sure you're alright, Potter?" McGonagall asked again.

"I could use a headache cure, actually, come to think of it. I got a headache on the train, and I know it'll get worse when I go to the Great Hall."

Madam Pomfrey nodded, and fetched her a potion to cure her headache; as soon as Iliana swallowed it, the headache faded away and disappeared.

"Ah, much better."

"Anything else?" McGonagall asked.

"No, I'm good now, thanks."

"Well alright then, Ms. Potter. Off you go. Ms. Granger, stay behind please, I need a private word with you."

Despite her words, Iliana waited for Hermione to be done, and they went to the feast together. They had missed the Sorting, but Iliana didn't mind too much. She was very glad for her headache cure, and hoped she wouldn't need another.

As she and Hermione walked to their places at the Griffindor table, people were pointing at her; the tale of her fainting on the train must have spread. She shrugged internally, as she didn't really care.

Once they and McGonagall took their respective places, Dumbledore stood up and made some announcements.

Dumbledore cleared his throat and said, "As you will all be aware after their search of the Hogwarts Express, our school is presently playing host to some of the dementors of Azkaban, who are here on Ministry of Magic business."

Tier hissed at this, aloud as it turned out, and Iliana put her hand to her mouth in embarrassment at her headmate's outburst, but nobody else appeared to have heard or noticed.

Despite this, and despite all the people in the room, Iliana still managed to feel Dumbledore's distaste for the dementors. She looked up to confirm this, and sure enough, he looked displeased.

"They are stationed at every entrance to the grounds," Dumbledore continued, "and while they are with us, I must make it plain that nobody is to leave school without permission. Dementors are not to be fooled by tricks or disguises — or even Invisibility Cloaks," he added blandly, and Iliana and Ron glanced at each other. "It is not in the nature of a dementor to understand pleading or excuses. I therefore warn each and every one of you to give them no reason to harm you. I look to the prefects, and our new Head Boy and Girl, to make sure that no student runs afoul of the dementors," he said.

She glanced over at Percy, who looked and felt more pleased with himself than usual.

Dumbledore paused again; he looked very seriously around the hall, and nobody moved or made a sound.

"On a happier note," he continued, "I am pleased to welcome two new teachers to our ranks this year.

"First, Professor Lupin, who has kindly consented to fill the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher."

There wasn't much applause at this, mostly only from the few people who had seen him fend off the dementor on the train. She supposed most people, having never heard of him before, were just being polite. Well, except for Malfoy, of course, who would probably still be judging him for being poor and shabby-looking.

"Look at Snape!" Ron hissed in her ear.

She looked at the grumpy professor, and was surprised. Snape was giving Lupin the kind of withering look of loathing usually reserved for Harry or Alastair.

"As to our second new appointment," Dumbledore continued as the lukewarm applause for Professor Lupin died away. "Well, I am sorry to tell you that Professor Kettleburn, our Care of Magical Creatures teacher, retired at the end of last year in order to enjoy more time with his remaining limbs. However, I am delighted to say that his place will be filled by none other than Rubeus Hagrid, who has agreed to take on this teaching job in addition to his gamekeeping duties."

There was much more cheering and applause at this, for far more people knew and loved Hagrid. The large man's face – what they could see of it through the beard – was bright red, and he was looking at his hands.

"Well that explains the biting book," Iliana said.

With everything of importance covered, Dumbledore signaled for the feast to begin, and it did, the containers and plates magically filling with food, and they dug in. But as delicious as it was, they were excited to finish so they could congratulate Hagrid, as this was only possible because they'd cleared Hagrid's name last year.

Their food eaten at last, the three of them ran up to Hagrid at the staff table and congratulated him. He was so thrilled that Dumbledore had offered him this job at the end of the last year, and he was eager to start classes.

"Just don't bring in anything dangerous, Hagrid," warned Iliana. "The last thing we need is for your first classes to be marred by chaos. You should start small and work your way up to the more impressive creatures."

"Oh, wha I got planned, they en't dangerous. Mind, they can look after themselves, but you treat 'em well, and they won't bother yeh none."

Iliana gave Hagrid a half-sincere smile in acknowledgement, but didn't speak her mind; she rather doubted Hagrid had anything approaching a normal estimate of where the line between interesting and monstrous was; between his vast size and his kindly nature, he tended to err on the side of compassion.

After dinner, they all went to their common rooms. Neville moaned at the new password (Fortuna Major) which he was certain he would forget.

"Just try to remember it sounds almost like Fortune Major," she told him. "Or imagine there's a talking tuna fish named Major, and you're bringing something to him; you've got something 'for Tuna Major.' "

Neville chuckled. "Thanks, Iliana. I'll try to keep it in mind."

"You're welcome. Oh, it also helps to repeat it to yourself often. Or it helps me, anyway."

As Iliana reached the stairs to the boy's dormitory, she stopped and frowned. It had made sense to just stick with the boy's dorm until now, but suddenly, being 13, she was having doubts. She didn't feel comfortable going up there now. But she had to go to bed, and she didn't know what else to do, and even if she did, now was not the time to make new arrangements. Sure, she could just talk with McGonagall, but that would have to wait. So with a sigh, she withdrew, and out came Harry instead, this time with no glow to their transformation at all.

But even Harry was hesitating. This was a bad idea for him; he hadn't been Out since the incident in Egypt with the Mirror of Erised. He was even less comfortable about going upstairs than Iliana was, and stood there shaking, trying to ignore Ron asking him what was wrong.

With another sigh, Al took over instead, their height shooting up as the older-looking boy took Harry's place.

"That was the first I've seen of Harry for ages," Ron said. "But it didn't last long. What's wrong with him?"

"That's for him to tell you, if he chooses to."

"Fair enough."

Al got changed into Pjs, and crawled into bed. As tired as they were, though, he couldn't sleep for almost an hour, laying there thinking about the ever more complicated situation they were in, wondering what to do about it. He also thought about Harry's problem. He didn't envy his host's position; it was one thing to turn into other people, two of whom were girls, but to figure out that you were actually a girl yourself, too, when you'd thought all your life that you were a boy? It had to be tough.

There were so many questions, so many challenges. Would Harry accept this fact about himself? Would he change his pronouns? His name? His dorm? Could Harry change his appearance? Al knew from doing some reading that there were sex-change potions, but he wasn't sure if they would work on Harry, given their frequent transformations. It might be that the only way Harry could transition – if he even wanted to – that he'd have to figure out a way to use their own personal magic to do it, as potions might not have a permanent effect on Harry. Or maybe they would, but they'd mess up everyone else in the collective, too?

Finally, though, Al drifted into a fitful sleep.

End note 1: I can't find where the Weasley's trip to Egypt started exactly, but I did find that it ended on the 25th of August, and the Daily Prophet said they'd be spending a month in Egypt, so I decided to go with them leaving July 25th.

End note 2: 700 galleons is $3367, according to  . 

End note 3: I am, again, using our own life as reference. We, too, have an empathic gift, and something very similar to Al's heart-reading power. In our youth, it was so powerful it was basically telepathy or legilimency. Since then, it became downgraded to being a divining rod against untrustworthy people, and a lie detector. And Iliana's headaches from empathic noise are something I still get. In fact, I had a headache myself when I wrote her first headache into the story.

End note 4: There's been a lot of speculation about why Harry saw Iliana in the Mirror of Erised in his first year. Here is what I was thinking when I wrote that scene: Harry subconsciously knows he likes how the body feels when they're Iliana. Harry, who is new to this whole thing, misinterprets this in his subconscious as a desire to be replaced by Iliana. The Mirror, which I figure can get confused if the person doesn't know what they want, even subconsciously, reflects his own confusion. Harry doesn't like this interpretation of things when he comes face to face with it. And thus, in this chapter, when he sees the Mirror again, his subconscious has finally worked out what it wanted all along, which is to be a girl without being replaced. IE, Harry is a trans girl and has only in this chapter come to consciously realize it.

I also want to remind everyone that the Potter collective are NOT a trauma based collective. Mainly because we in my own collective do not believe that trauma in and of itself causes multiplicity; if it did, I think most people would be multiples by now, because it seems to me that most people have trauma in their childhoods, and given how much war and starvation there is in the world, and how much child abuse, we genuinely do not believe childhood trauma causes multiplicity. Many collectives are riddled with _other_ trauma-created mental illnesses that may impair their collective's functioning, but this is A) True of singlets as well, and B) _Such_ a far cry from trauma causing multiplicity. You may agree or disagree, that is your right. But we're using our own collective as a model for the Potter collective, and we do not consider ourselves trauma-created, because the signs of us being a Collective have been there all our lives, we had a great life up until kindergarten, and even then the only "trauma" was bullying at school, which wasn't even that bad, as we mostly just ignored it. Yes, we developed depression and anxiety, but lots of singlets have that, too. Since any mind can become ill, it's reasonable to assume that the different minds in a Collective can have different mental illnesses or personality disorders, and that these things can be comorbid with their multiplicity. (For instance, imagine someone bipolar – or with PTSD – sharing a body with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder.)


	14. Cutting Remarks

" **The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 14"**

 **By = Fayanora**

 **Chapter Fourteen:** **Cutting Remarks**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of _**Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ and _Zoey_ , and now # ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__

His sleep having been fitful, Alastair was even grumpier in the morning than usual, at least until he got some food into him. Malfoy pretending to faint in terror to tease them didn't help his mood any, and he snapped back at the git.

"I may pass out from dementor attacks, Malfoy, but at least I've never snogged my mother, unlike you!"

It was fortunate that the teachers stepped in to prevent violence. Al ignored them all and sat down to eat. He was very hungry, too, eating fully twice what they usually ate at meals, and was still chowing down when McGonagall came around with the class schedules.

"You'd better watch out, Al," Ron said. "Malfoy looks ready to kill."

"He tries anything, I'll transfigure his mouth and his eyes permanently shut."

"You could do that?"

"Probably. Or Zoey could, anyway."

Ron made a faintly scared sound, then shook himself.

"Anyway... what'd you guys take, Al?" asked Ron. "I forget."

"Ancient Runes, Divination, and Care of Magical Creatures. Ancient Runes sounded interesting. Divination... well, given what the centaurs called us our first year, that only made sense. And Care of Magical Creatures sounded useful. Should be interesting, with Hagrid teaching it."

He turned to Hermione, looking at her schedule. He saw just enough before she snatched it away to raise his eyebrows. Ron had seen, too.

"Hermione, they've mucked up your schedule," Ron said. "Half these classes are at the same time, there's no way you can get to them all!"

"Never mind, Ron. I fixed it all with McGonagall, it's fine."

Ron and Hermione went back and forth some more on this, Ron increasingly bewildered, until Al finally spoke.

"Well isn't it obvious? She got given a time machine last night when she was talking with McGonagall."

He felt a sharp spike of panic from Hermione, though the fact she'd knocked over her pumpkin juice would've been telling enough. He raised an eyebrow at her; he'd been speaking sarcastically, but might he be onto something?

 _ **Time travel, real? Nah, that's preposterous.**_

"Don't be silly, Al, there's no such thing," Hermione said.

While he privately agreed, he found it amusing to be contrary, so he said, "Funny, my uncle used to say the same thing about magic. Frequently. More like he was trying to convince himself than me, to be honest."

More panic. Al resisted the urge to smile. Whatever the truth was, he was making her uncomfortable.

"Either that or a cloning machine," he said, to go in a more realistic direction. "Is there something like _Gemino_ for people?"

"Cloning machine?" Ron asked.

"Fictional device that can make exact copies of humans or other animals. Not quite the same as actual cloning would be, of course. If they ever pull off actual cloning, it'd be more like making an identical twin you'd never grown up with, and it'd be an infant, and have to grow like a normal person. But, hmm... I wonder... _Gemino!_ "

He had pointed his wand at Ron when he said this, but all that happened was a copy of Ron's robes appeared in the air beside him.

"Oy, don't use me to experiment on, mate! I don't want to get accidentally transfigured into a moose or something."

"Duly noted," Al said.

Hagrid passed them then, stopping to gush about how they were going to be in his first class later today, and how he'd gotten everything set up. Ron wondered, with some worry in his voice, what Hagrid had prepared.

"Well it's unlikely to be a dragon, so that's good news," Al said.

"Yeah, but there's a lot of other dangerous creatures it could be. Hope it isn't manticores or a chimera or something worse."

But they had to cut off their discussion then, because they had Divination, which was all the way in North Tower. It took them every shortcut they knew to get there in time, and even then they had to get help from the painting of a very annoying and inept knight named Sir Cadogan.

"You know," Al said as they approached the rest of the class, who were waiting in the corridor, "I wonder if Hogwarts teaches how to make portraits like that. I'd love to get one made of myself, and live forever."

"You'd be trapped in a painting, though," Ron pointed out.

The class was assembled at a tiny landing, but there was no sign of the door. At least, not until they happened to look up and see a door in the ceiling.

"'Sybil Trelawney,'" he said, reading the plaque on the door. "If I'd known this was going to happen, I would've brought my broom."

As soon as he said this, the circular door opened and a silvery ladder came down.

"Glad I'm not wheelchair bound," Al said, climbing up the ladder. "Or afraid of heights," he finished, getting to the top and looking down.

# _ **I'm sure someone in a wheelchair could float up,#**_ Iliana said internally.

 _ **Good point.**_

He emerged into the strangest-looking classroom he had ever seen. In fact, it didn't look like a classroom at all, more like a cross between someone's attic and an old-fashioned tea shop. At least twenty small, circular tables were crammed inside it, all surrounded by chintz armchairs and fat little poufs. Everything was lit with a dim, crimson light; the curtains at the windows were all closed, and the many lamps were draped with dark red scarves. It was stiflingly warm, and the fire that was burning under the crowded mantelpiece was giving off a heavy, sickly sort of perfume as it heated a large copper kettle. The shelves running around the circular walls were crammed with dusty-looking feathers, stubs of candles, many packs of tattered playing cards, countless silvery crystal balls, and a huge array of teacups.

"Where is she?"

A voice came suddenly out of the shadows, a soft, misty sort of voice.

"Welcome," it said. "How nice to see you in the physical world at last."

Al snorted with barely-suppressed laughter. He saw through this woman at once; she was a fraud with no real talent.

"I can already tell you this class is going to be a waste of time," he told Ron.

"How d'ya reckon?"

"My heart-reading ability, of course. She's a total fraud."

Her appearance didn't help matters, either; looking like a large insect, glittering with bangles and draped in shawls, she looked like a bad stereotype of a "gypsy" fortuneteller, except that she was white.

"Sit, my children, sit," she said, and they all climbed awkwardly into armchairs or sank onto poufs. Al crossed his arms and resisted the urge to put his feet up on the table, but only just. Which was for the better, as Hermione would've berated him for it.

"Welcome to Divination," said Professor Trelawney, who had seated herself in a winged armchair in front of the fire. "My name is Professor Trelawney. You may not have seen me before. I find that descending too often into the hustle and bustle of the main school clouds my Inner Eye."

Nobody said anything to this, though Al barked once with laughter.

Looking annoyed but not calling him out on his behavior, Professor Trelawney delicately rearranged her shawl and continued, "So you have chosen to study Divination, the most difficult of all magical arts. I must warn you at the outset that if you do not have the Sight, there is very little I will be able to teach you. Books can take you only so far in this field."

Al and Ron looked at each other, then at an astonished Hermione, then back again, and grinned. Hermione was so used to being able to read her way through any class, this was going to be interesting, watching how she'd take a class where that wasn't very helpful.

"Many witches and wizards, talented though they are in the area of loud bangs and smells and sudden disappearings, are yet unable to penetrate the veiled mysteries of the future," Professor Trelawney went on, her enormous, gleaming eyes moving from face to nervous face. "It is a Gift granted to few. You, boy," she said suddenly to Neville, who almost toppled off his pouf. "Is your grandmother well?"

"I think so," said Neville tremulously.

"I wouldn't be so sure if I were you, dear," said Professor Trelawney, the firelight glinting on her long emerald earrings. Neville gulped.

Al sat up straighter and interrupted. "Hey, that's not on. What gives you the right to scare him like that with your vague prediction and then not offer any further explanation?"

Professor Trelawney stared at him incredulously, as though she wasn't used to people interrupting her and didn't know what to make of it. Then she crossed her arms and looked imperiously down at him.

"Pardon me, young man, but I am the teacher here, and you the pupil. You will withhold any comments until I am done."

"I don't think so. Neville gets scared enough by that overgrown bat, Snape, he doesn't need you making this class difficult for him, too. By all means continue making predictions at us to try to impress us, but leave poor Neville out of it."

She seemed to focus as he said this, regarding him more carefully. She lifted up a set of papers to look at it.

"Your name, brash young man?"

"Alastair Potter."

"Ah," she said, as though delighted to find some succulent prey, "the Potter collective. I have seen much about you in my crystal ball, of late."

"Sure you have. And I'm all five of the Three Stooges," he said. Only a couple people laughed; the rest looked confused.

Trelawney didn't seem to know how to respond to this, and stood there for several moments looking torn, before setting the papers down and pulling her shawls around her again, looking determined.

"Moving on," she said placidly, "We will be covering the basic methods of Divination this year. The first term will be devoted to reading the tea leaves. Next term we shall progress to palmistry. By the way, my dear," she shot suddenly at Parvati Patil, "beware a red-haired man."

Parvati gave a startled look at Ron, who was right behind her, and edged her chair away from him. Al rolled his eyes, threw his head back, and sighed very loudly. Trelawney glared at him, but ignored him.

"In the second term," Professor Trelawney went on, "we shall progress to the crystal ball — if we have finished with fire omens, that is. Unfortunately, classes will be disrupted in February by a nasty bout of flu. I myself will lose my voice-"

Al turned to Ron and stage whispered. "Flu, in a school full of kids. Good prediction, that one. All she has to do to make it come true is lick every doorknob she finds."

There was a ripple of laughter at this. Hermione, he noticed, looked torn between annoyance at Al's disrespect toward a teacher, and the urge to laugh at his comments.

Trelawney, who was plainly used to her mystic attitude doing all the work of keeping classes orderly for her, shook a little, then in a louder, more authoritarian voice, she said, "And around Easter, one of our number will leave us forever."

Even Al didn't have anything to say to that one.

Her disruptive student struck speechless, Trelawney continued with a smug look on her face.

"I wonder, dear," she said to Lavender Brown, who was nearest and shrank back in her chair, "if you could pass me the largest silver teapot?"

Lavender, looking relieved, stood up, took an enormous teapot from the shelf, and put it down on the table in front of Professor Trelawney.

"Thank you, my dear. Incidentally, that thing you are dreading — it will happen on Friday the sixteenth of October."

"Could you vague that up for her?" Al said, a little lamely.

Lavender, however, trembled.

"Now, I want you all to divide into pairs. Collect a teacup from the shelf, come to me, and I will fill it. Then sit down and drink, drink until only the dregs remain. Swill these around the cup three times with the left hand, then turn the cup upside down on its saucer, wait for the last of the tea to drain away, then give your cup to your partner to read. You will interpret the patterns using pages five and six of _Unfogging the Future._ I shall move among you, helping and instructing." At this point she turned to Neville as if to speak, then – glancing at Al – thought better of it.

They went about getting cups and saucers, and making tea. Al looked at his with disgust.

"Ewww. It's got bits of leaf floating in it," he told Ron. "I mean, I suppose it wouldn't work otherwise, but usually if there's tea leaves in the tea, I throw it out and try again."

"You've never had loose leaf tea before?"

"Oh, sure I have. Aunt Petunia would never be caught dead buying anything as gauche and low class as teabags. But her tea sets all had these metal inserts to keep the tea leaves from getting into the tea itself, like a metal teabag. She hated it when tea leaves would get in the tea. I guess I got that from her," he said, looking very annoyed about it.

Glaring at the tea, he slurped it down as fast as he could, gagging on the tea leaves and spitting them out like he'd gotten sand in his mouth.

"That would've been quite good if it hadn't been for the tea leaves floating in it," Al said.

"Wish she'd given us milk," Ron said. "At least there's sugar."

"Ew," Al commented. "I like my tea like I like my clothing; black and bitter as Hell."

Ron stared at him. He shrugged.

"Okay, so that sounded funnier in my head. Anyway, let's trade cups, read each other's fortunes."

They did, opening their books as well, looking for symbols to look for.

"Whadda ya see in mine?" Ron asked.

"Load of soggy brown stuff," Al said. He suddenly became aware of how hot it was in the room, something he knew from experience wasn't good for them. Even he, who had some immunity to the soporific effects of heat, felt groggy.

"Broaden your minds, my dears, and allow your eyes to see past the mundane!" Professor Trelawney cried through the gloom.

For all his sass at the teacher, Al wanted to actually be able to do this stuff, so he tried to focus.

"Right, you've got a crooked sort of cross …" He consulted _Unfogging the Future._ "That means you're going to have 'trials and suffering' — sorry about that — but there's a thing that could be the sun … hang on … that means 'great happiness' … so you're going to suffer but be very happy. You're not a masochist, are you?"

"You need your Inner Eye tested, if you ask me," said Ron, and they both had to stifle their laughs as Professor Trelawney gazed in their direction.

"My turn …" Ron peered into Al's teacup, his forehead wrinkled with effort. "There's a blob a bit like a bowler hat," he said. "Maybe you're going to work for the Ministry of Magic. …"

He turned the teacup the other way up.

"But this way it looks more like an acorn. … What's that?" He scanned his copy of _Unfogging the Future._ " 'A windfall, unexpected gold.' Excellent, you can lend me some … and there's a thing here," he turned the cup again, "that looks like an animal … yeah, if that was its head … it looks like a hippo … no, a sheep …"

Professor Trelawney whirled around as Al let out a bark of laughter.

"Let me see that, my dear," she said reprovingly to Ron, sweeping over and snatching Al's cup from him. Everyone went quiet to watch.

Professor Trelawney was staring into the teacup, rotating it counterclockwise.

"The falcon … my dear, you have a deadly enemy."

"No shit, Sherlock," Al said, half the class aghast at his cheek. "Ever since I was born, that's been true, and every witch and wizard in the world knows it, too. Moldy Voldy, dumb and oldy, should be six feet under, coldy."

"The club … an attack. Dear, dear, this is not a happy cup. …"

"I thought that was a bowler hat," said Ron sheepishly.

"Convenient how a hat morphs into a club," Al commented. "Almost like you're making it up as you go along. Oh wait!" he said, mimicking an iconic scene from Home Alone.

"The skull … danger in your path, my dear. …"

"Given that a deranged lunatic escaped from prison to kill me, that's not exactly a prophecy."

Everyone was staring, transfixed, at Professor Trelawney, who gave the cup a final turn, gasped, and then screamed. Al jumped, clutching his heart.

"Ye gods, woman!"

"My dear boy … my poor, dear boy … no … it is kinder not to say … no … don't ask me."

"Oh don't tell me!" Al said, putting two fingers from each hand on each temple, and closing his eyes. "Eeny meeny, chili beeny, I predict you've found... a death omen!"

He opened his eyes to see her looking at him like he'd stolen her thunder.

"Aha! I was right, wasn't I?"

Her lips got very thin, and she looked like she was debating whether or not to speak.

"Yes," she said, finally.

"YES! I'm good at this already! So go on, don't spare the rod, let me hear how bad it is! Don't pull any punches, I can take it," he said melodramatically, lifting the back of one hand daintily to his forehead.

"I see... the Grim."

Everyone who was raised in the wizarding world gasped. Al opened his eyes, his hand still on his forehead.

"Well that was anti-climactic," he said. "What is the Grim?"

"The Grim... it is a giant spectral dog that haunts churchyards. It is the most dire omen of death."

"Well we all die eventually," Al said.

"Yes, we do," Trelawney said, annoyed. "But an omen means imminent death."

"So it's just a _dog_ that you see? Hey, maybe your inner eye is myopic; maybe it just means I'm going to be friends with a large black dog."

Hermione huffily took the teacup from Trelawney and looked inside.

" _I_ don't think it looks like a Grim," she said flatly.

Trelawney glared at Hermione, obviously annoyed and thinking Al's bad attitude was spreading.

"You'll forgive me for saying so, my dear, but I perceive very little aura around you. Very little receptivity to the resonances of the future. Both of you."

"Nah, I'm just allergic to fruh... fruh... FRUH... ACHOO! Allergic to frauds."

Trelawney's gaze turned to Al, and it was plain she was growing to really dislike him. She stood there, her arms crossed, as though thinking about whether to slap him or not.

"Detention, Mr. Potter, for your disrespect!"

"OooooOoooo..." the class intoned.

Al fist pumped. "Woohoo! Detention on the first day! A personal record!"

"And ten points from Griffindor," she added, before skulking away in disgust. "See me after class for instructions on your detention."

"Righty-o," Al said, saluting.

"You really oughtn't have done that, you know," Hermione said as they went to Transfiguration.

Al shrugged. "Yeah, but I went into that class expecting a talented person teaching us, someone actually able to tell the future. If I wanted a scam artist, I could go to the Muggle world for that."

"What'd she give you for detention, anyway?" Ron asked.

Al giggled. "Polishing her crystal balls. While under a Silencing Charm."

Ron chuckled. "Not terribly creative. Except for the Silencing Charm part."

"Yeah, she's no doubt going to regale me with dire predictions of my death and/or dismemberment the whole time, probably turning that fire on so high that I fall asleep."

When they got to Transfiguration, most of the class wasn't paying attention to McGonagall's lesson, but Al was so enthralled by the idea of Animagi that he, Hermione, and Ron were the only ones to applaud when she changed into a cat and back again.

"Thank you, you three," she said graciously. "But really, what has gotten into the rest of you? Not that I mind, but that's the first time my transformation's not got applause from the _entire_ class."

Everyone turned to look at Al, who was leaning back in his chair so it was standing only on two legs. But it was Hermione who broke the silence at last.

"Please, Professor, we've just had our first Divination class, and we were reading the tea leaves, and —"

"Ah, of course," said Professor McGonagall, suddenly frowning. "There is no need to say any more, Miss Granger. Tell me, which of you will be dying this year?"

Everyone stared at her.

"Who else could it be but me?" Al said easily, a toothpick hanging from the corner of his mouth, his hands behind his head.

"I see," McGonagall said. "In that case, Mr. Potter, you should know that Sibyll Trelawney has predicted the death of one student a year since she arrived at this school. None of them has died yet. Seeing death omens is her favorite way of greeting a new class. If it were not for the fact that I never speak ill of my colleagues..."

Professor McGonagall broke off, and they saw that her nostrils had gone white. She went on, more calmly, "Divination is one of the most imprecise branches of magic. I shall not conceal from you that I have very little patience with it. True Seers are very rare, and Professor Trelawney..."

"...is an old fraud," Al finished for her.

She did not reply at first, which was telling enough as is. When she did speak, it was in a matter-of-fact tone.

"You look in excellent health to me, Mr. Potter, so you will excuse me if I don't let you off homework today. I assure you that if you die, you need not hand it in."

Hermione and Ron laughed.

"Not even if I leave a ghost behind?"

"As ghosts cannot do magic, no; not even then."

On their way out of Transfiguration, they discussed the Grim and Trelawney again.

"You know, my uncle Bilius saw a Grim once, and died 24 hours later. So she's not wrong about it being a death omen, but since you say you haven't seen one, I'm not worried."

"Coincidence," said Hermione airily, pouring herself some pumpkin juice.

"Excuse me?"

"It's just a coincidence, what happened to your uncle."

Ron glared at her. "You don't know what you're talking about! Grims scare the living daylights out of most wizards!"

"There you are, then," said Hermione in a superior tone. "They see the Grim and die of fright. The Grim's not an omen, it's the cause of death!"

Ron looked about to speak, but Hermione interrupted.

"Divination seems very wooly to me. Not very interesting, either, unlike my Arithmancy class."

"What're you talking about? You can't've been to Arithmancy yet, you've been with us all morning."

Hermione sniffed and stalked off.

"Time machine, Ron. Bet you anything she's got a time machine."

Their Care of Magical Creatures class was after lunch, under a pleasant, sunlit sky, the grass still springy from the rain the day before. Al was still chewing on a toothpick, walking along with his hands in his robe pockets, his two best friends at his sides. They weren't talking to one another, but it was better than bickering.

When Al approached Malfoy (they were having this lesson with the Slytherins), he waved as though to a friend and said in Parseltongue, _'Beautiful day, isn't it?'_

Malfoy, who had been regarding Al with hatred a moment before, jumped back, terrified.

 _'What, I can't greet a fellow student amicably?'_

The Slytherins, and even some of the Griffindors, backed away from Al.

"Al, stop doing that," Hermione scolded him.

Al shrugged. "Sorry. I see a snake, I speak Parseltongue. It's a reflex."

Hagrid was waiting for his class at the door of his hut. He stood in his moleskin overcoat, with Fang the boarhound at his heels, looking impatient to start.

"C'mon, now, get a move on!" he called as the class approached. "Got a real treat for yeh today! Great lesson comin' up! Everyone here? Right, follow me!"

For a moment, Al thought they were going to be led to the Forbidden Forest, but instead, they went to a paddock around the edges of the trees.

"Everyone gather 'round the fence here!" he called. "That's it — make sure yeh can see — now, firs' thing yeh'll want ter do is open yer books —"

"How?" said the cold, drawling voice of Draco Malfoy.

"Eh?" said Hagrid.

"How do we open our books?" Malfoy repeated. He took out his copy of _The Monster Book of Monsters,_ which he had bound shut with a length of rope. Other people took theirs out too; some, like Al, had belted their book shut; others had crammed them inside tight bags or clamped them together with binder clips.

"Hasn' — hasn' anyone bin able ter open their books?" said Hagrid, looking crestfallen.

The class all shook their heads.

"Yeh've got ter _stroke_ 'em," said Hagrid, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. "Look —"

He took Hermione's copy and ripped off the Spellotape that bound it. The book tried to bite, but Hagrid ran a giant forefinger down its spine, and the book shivered, and then fell open and lay quiet in his hand.

"Oh, how silly we've all been!" Malfoy sneered. "We should have _stroked_ them! Why didn't we guess!"

Al frowned at him. "Yeah, Malfoy, why _didn't_ you think of that? You're an expert in stroking, after all."

The whole class burst into laughter at this, except for most of the Slytherins of course. But Hagrid, who had been looking crestfallen a moment ago, was chuckling as well, which had been Al's intent. That, and shutting up Malfoy.

"Well," Hagrid said after a few moments. "open yer books, as I said. Got em? Good. Now, turn ter page 123, the entry on Hippogriffs, and follow me."

They opened their books and followed Hagrid.

"God, this place is going to the dogs," said Malfoy loudly. "That oaf teaching classes, my father'll have a fit when I tell him."

"That's about all he _can_ do about it, now he's no longer a school governor," Al loudly commented back. "Which is what happens when you put Moldywart's old school things into innocent hands in order to open secret chambers to let horrible monsters loose onto the school. Good thing there wasn't any proof, or he'd be feeding the dementors up in Azkaban, and we all know what a huge loss _that_ would be."

"Watch out, Potter, there's a dementor behind you!" Malfoy said venomously.

Al barked with laughter. "That comeback was lamer than a legless unicorn in broken crutches."

Malfoy turned red, and shut up. Al grinned.

Then they were there, and Al looked in amazement at the most bizarre creatures he'd ever laid eyes on. They had head and forelegs like oversized eagles, and the back half of a horse. Each of the creatures had a thick leather collar around its neck, being led by a long chain.

"Gee up, there!" Hagrid roared, shaking the chains and urging the creatures toward the fence where the class stood. Everyone drew back slightly as Hagrid reached them and tethered the creatures to the fence.

"Hippogriffs!" Hagrid roared happily, waving a hand at them. "Beau'iful, aren' they?"

"Those. Are. AMAZING!" Al exclaimed, making Hagrid beam. "How old d'ya have to be to buy one?"

"At leas' 17, an' yeh need a special license an' all, too. Yeh see those beaks and claws? They can take a chunk outta yeh if you bait 'em.

"So," said Hagrid, rubbing his hands together and beaming around, "if yeh wan' ter come a bit nearer —"

No one seemed to want to. Al, Ron, and Hermione, however, approached the fence cautiously.

"Now, firs' thing yeh gotta know abou' hippogriffs is, they're proud," said Hagrid. "Easily offended, hippogriffs are. Don't never insult one, 'cause it might be the last thing yeh do."

Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle weren't listening; they were talking in an undertone and Al had a nasty feeling they were plotting how best to disrupt the lesson.

"Hey Malfoy!" he yelled, getting the Slytherin's attention. "Pay attention, if you don't want your hand snipped off or something. If you eff this up for Hagrid, I will transfigure a pair of bollocks onto your chin!"

"Don't tell me what to do, Potty."

Al smiled creepily at Malfoy and said, in an equally creepy tone of voice, "Your funeral."

"Yeh always wait fer the hippogriff ter make the firs' move," Hagrid continued. "It's polite, see? Yeh walk toward him, and yeh bow, an' yeh wait. If he bows back, yeh're allowed ter touch him. If he doesn' bow, then get away from him sharpish, 'cause those talons hurt.

"Right — who wants ter go first?"

Al looked around; nobody, not even Ron or Hermione, wanted to do it. So he shrugged and stepped forward.

"I'll do it," he said.

There was an intake of breath from behind him, and both Lavender and Parvati whispered, "Oooh, no, Al, remember your tea leaves!"

Al rolled his eyes at them, and climbed over the paddock fence.

"Good man, Al!" roared Hagrid. "Right then — let's see how yeh get on with Buckbeak."

He untied one of the chains, pulled the gray hippogriff away from its fellows, and slipped off its leather collar. The class on the other side of the paddock seemed to be holding its breath. Malfoy's eyes were narrowed maliciously.

"Do I have to bow?" Al asked. "I mean, can't I curtsy instead?"

The whole class laughed.

"You're a boy, Al," said Lavender Brown.

Al glared at her. "Yeah, so? Boys can curtsy too. Boys and girls can do anything they want. Girls can be boys. Boys can be girls."

Everyone laughed, again.

"I'm not joking for once. Girls _can_ be boys, and boys _can_ be girls. And I'll support anyone and everyone who made a realization like that about themselves, even if it was Malfoy!"

"I'm not a bloody girl, Potter!" Malfoy shouted, his face hot.

Al waved his hand dismissively. "Of course you aren't."

"I'm NOT a bloody girl!"

"Didn't say you were, _Maco Dralfoy._ In fact, you're _**far**_ too weak and pathetic to ever be something as awesome as a girl!"

Malfoy snorted derisively. "You sound like you want to be one yourself."

"I don't, but I'll support anyone who did. And to anyone who made fun of 'em for it, I'd punch 'em in the face!"

"Al, none o' that now, okay? I'm tryin ter teach yeh how ter handle Beaky."

"Oh. Sorry, Hagrid."

" 's'all righ,' Al. Anyway, step on up. Easy, now. Good lad. Now, make eye contact. Good, good. Now that yeh've got eye contact, jes try not ter blink. Hippogriffs don' trust yeh if yeh blink too much."

Al's eyes immediately began to water, but he didn't shut them. Buckbeak had turned his great, sharp head and was staring at Al with one fierce orange eye.

"Why? Do they have something against me keeping dust out of my eyes?"

"Mind yer smart tongue 'round hippogriffs, Al."

"Duly noted."

"Tha's it," said Hagrid. "Tha's it, Al … now, bow …"

Al didn't feel much like exposing the back of his neck to Buckbeak, but he did as he was told. He gave a short bow, said, "Milord Buckbeak," and then looked up.

The hippogriff was still staring haughtily at him. It didn't move.

"Ah," said Hagrid, sounding worried. "Right — back away, now, Al, easy does it."

But then, to Al's enormous surprise, the hippogriff suddenly bent its scaly front knees and sank into what was an unmistakable bow.

"Well done, Al!" said Hagrid, ecstatic. "Right — yeh can touch him! Pat his beak, go on!"

"Okay," Al said warily, and patted the large animal on the beak.

The class broke into applause, all except for Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle, who were looking deeply disappointed.

"Righ' then, Al, I reckon he'll let yeh ride 'im now. Yup, right there behind the wing joint. Don't pull out any of 'is feathers, 'e won't like that none."

Once Al was secure, Hagrid slapped the animal on the backside, and it took off running, then leapt into the sky, flying around.

 _ **Holy shit!**_ Al said to Harry and the others. _**How the bloody hell does this thing fly? It must weigh a ton!**_

 **#** _ **Probably with magic,**_ **#** answered Iliana.

 _ **Good point.**_

The hippogriff flew Al around the paddock a few times, then landed with a thump that made Al wince.

"Good work, Al! Now who else wants a go?"

Al watched the others, emboldened by his success, try it on different hippogriffs. Neville kept backing away from his. Al watched Draco warily, for the Slytherin had gotten Buckbeak.

"Hey Malfoy! Remember, don't insult it. I know it's difficult for you, treating someone other than yourself as an equal, but it's that or death!" Al shouted. Malfoy, of course, ignored him.

"This is very easy," Malfoy drawled, loud enough for Al to hear him. "I knew it must have been, if Potter could do it. … I bet you're not dangerous at all, are you?" he said to the hippogriff. "Are you, you great ugly brute?"

In a flash, Buckbeak reared and started to slash at Malfoy. But Al, who had been expecting trouble, magically shoved the blond boy out of the way.

"That bloody chicken tried to murder me!" Malfoy shouted, shaking like a leaf in wind. "I could've died!"

"Maybe if you'd actually listened to Hagrid _and_ me about not insulting him, that wouldn't have happened! Honestly, could you maybe pull your head out of your arse every once in a while?"

But Malfoy kept going on about it, threatening to sic his father on Hagrid and Buckbeak, making Hagrid very flustered.

"Oh sure, run squealing to Daddy like a pathetic baby every time your actions have consequences, Draco, because that's just _so_ mature!"

Still, the git wouldn't shut up, and he started storming off, still ranting about his father hearing about this. But Al grabbed the back of his robes and yanked him back around, then grabbed the front of his robes. Crabbe and Goyle surged forward, but a force-field knocked them down as he glared at Malfoy.

"Did I not warn you," he said in a dangerously quiet voice, "to not fuck this up for Hagrid? Did I not tell you I would transfigure bollocks to your chin if you disobeyed?"

Malfoy whimpered as Al held his free hand over his face. Then, in a flash of movement, Al grabbed Malfoy's chin and caused a familiar glow to wash over the boy's face. When it stopped, Malfoy had a pair of very hairy testicles hanging from his chin.

"You have a problem with me or any of the rest of my collective, you take it up with me. Try taking it out on my friends again, Malfoy, and next time I will make you cut your own, actual testicles off and EAT them. Understood?"

The blond boy nodded meekly.

"Good. Now run along," Al said, letting go at last, and giggled evilly as Malfoy scampered off to the hospital wing to get his face put back right.

Al whistled a jaunty tune the whole way back to the castle, utterly at ease, Ron on one side of him, struggling to stop laughing long enough to breathe, Hermione on his other side, torn between giggles and recriminating looks.

His eyes were closed as they approached the door, but he suddenly opened them and grinned.

"I can feel McGonagall coming. And boy oh boy, she is _pissed off_ at me!"

Fully 20 seconds later, the oak front doors slammed open, and Professor McGonagall, her face contorted in fury. Ron and Hermione both looked at him in amazement. Or at least, Al thought that's what Ron was doing; it was hard to tell, since the redhead was still laughing so hard he could barely breathe.

McGonagall finally caught up to them, and all four of them stopped.

"So, Professor, how many detentions, and how many points off?" Al asked.

McGonagall opened her mouth to speak, but seemed unable. She pointed at him furiously, apoplectic not only with what he'd done, but his wry smirk as well.

"Seventy-five points from Griffindor, Mr. Potter," she finally said. "And a week's worth of detentions. With Professor Snape. And it will be _you_ , understood? None of the others are to take your place."

Al's smile faltered, momentarily.

"Totally worth it," he said. "And agreed. Anything else, Professor?"

Her face, if anything, grew more angry.

"Now see here, Mr. Bl- I mean, Mr. Potter... you... my office. _**Now.**_ "

Al sighed, his smile finally leaving his face. "Okay, okay. I'm coming."

"And you, Mr. Weasley, to the hospital wing for a Calming Draught, before you pass out from hypoxia."

"So," Ron said later at dinner. "What did McGonagall say to you in her office?"

"Oh, it was a very long rant. The gist of it was, she gave me an extra week of detentions, and insisted I write an apology that at least sounded sincere, and insisted I write it there, so she could read it to make sure it was acceptable. She also watched me give it to Malfoy. This is a copy of the letter, here."

Ron read the letter. The farther down he got in it, the more confused he looked, and the more Al grinned. Hermione regarded him warily. By the time Ron finished, Al was stifling giggles.

"Something's weird about this letter, but I can't put my finger on it."

"Oh here, give me that," Hermione said, snatching it out of Ron's hand. She read it, too.

It read:

 _Dear Draco Malfoy,_

 _I am deeply sorry for disfiguring your face. When I got angry at you, I should have just used words, instead of causing you physical harm. I can only hope you will accept my heartfelt apology for my heated behavior. Ladies and gentlemen do not behave in such a manner, and in my position of fame, I should strive to be a better example to others. Lonnie Williams, a famous Muggle philosopher, once said that to err is human, to forgive is divine. Forgive me, please, for this slight on your person. Under no circumstances will I ever do such a thing again, I assure you. Can I do anything to repay you for the embarrassment I have caused? Kin we are, I believe, given the old age of my family, and so my kin, I shall pay reparations if you insist. Yes, even if you wish me to apologize to you in front of the whole school! Only tell me your wish, and I shall do it, within reason. (Understand, I will not break any laws or hurt anyone else, those are my limits.)_

 _Until we meet again;_

 _Potter, Alastair._

"Oh Al, you _didn't_!"

Al was trying very hard not to laugh, and not having much success.

"Didn't what? What did you see that I didn't?"

"Here. Take the first letter of every sentence and put them in order next to each other," she said, handing the letter to Ron. "Honestly, I can't believe Professor McGonagall didn't notice that."

Ron's eyes went over the letter again for several moments. Halfway through, he was grinning. When he finished, he burst out laughing.

"Brilliant!" he exclaimed. "Bloody brilliant!"

"Oh Ronald, it is _not_ brilliant. He's lucky he didn't get into even _more_ trouble."

"How did you spot that so quickly, anyway, 'mione?"

"Well, I was already suspicious before I read it, and would've been anyway after a few sentences. But there _is_ no famous Muggle _anyone_ named Lonnie Williams, as far as I know of, and that's not who said that quote anyway. He clearly made up the name because he couldn't think of any other way to put the second 'L' in 'will.'"

Al lost control, then, and barked with laughter so loud that it made several people jump in surprise. Then he spent the next few minutes laughing more normally, banging his fist on the table, tears coming from his eyes.

"You lot're havin' a lotta fun over here, I see," said Hagrid's voice behind them. "Wha's so funny, Al?"

"Oh, nothing, Hagrid," Al said, crumpling up the letter and pocketing it. "Just remembering what I did to a certain blond git."

"Well, don't do it again, funny as it was," Hagrid said quietly. "Still not sure what young Mr. Malfoy's gonna do. But I do reckon I started out a little too big fer me first class. Reckon I shoulda gone with unicorns or summat."

"Yeah, hippogriffs are maybe more of a fifth year creature," Al agreed.

"Anyway, thanks fer getting' Malfoy outta the way o' Beaky. No tellin' what woulda happened if yeh hadn't."

"Cheers, Hagrid," Al said, holding up his pumpkin juice.

There was no additional fallout from the incident, other than Malfoy regarding Al with a mixture of hatred and fear every time they passed each other. The detentions with Snape were horrible, of course; Snape had Al cutting up pickled toads and sorting the organs into individual containers the whole week long, staying to watch and offer pointed comments with a gleeful sneer. Why Snape needed so many pickled toads was beyond him; maybe it was a delicacy for the bat-like teacher?

Either despite these detentions, or because of them, Potions classes were far easier for the duration. At least, until one of Thursday's classes.

They were making a Shrinking Solution. Al found that he was a moderately good potioneer when Snape wasn't glaring at him in hatred and grinding his teeth audibly in his general direction, so all in all, the class was going reasonably well. That is, until Neville – whom Snape was still harassing – messed up his potion so badly it turned orange; it was supposed to be acid green.

"Orange, Longbottom," said Snape, ladling some up and allowing it to splash back into the cauldron, so that everyone could see. "Orange. Tell me, boy, does anything penetrate that thick skull of yours? Didn't you hear me say, quite clearly, that only one rat spleen was needed? Didn't I state plainly that a dash of leech juice would suffice? What do I have to do to make you understand, Longbottom?"

Neville was pink and trembling. He looked as though he was on the verge of tears.

"Please, sir," said Hermione, "please, I could help Neville put it right —"

"I don't remember asking you to show off, Miss Granger," said Snape coldly, and Hermione went as pink as Neville. "Longbottom, at the end of this lesson we will feed a few drops of this potion to your toad and see what happens. Perhaps that will encourage you to do it properly."

Al stood up, glaring at Snape. Everybody turned to look at him.

"You know, maybe you'd be a better teacher if you didn't engage in blatant emotional abuse, you overgrown bat."

The whole room went dead quiet. Snape turned, regarding Al with a look like ice.

"Twenty points from Griffindor, Potter. Sit down before I add another few nights to your detentions."

"No. Neville is nervous enough with this subject as is, and then you deliberately target him, emotionally abusing him just because you seem to derive pleasure from bullying students. Why are you even a teacher if you hate kids so much?"

"Why I do the things I do is no concern of yours, Potter. But for your information, I derive no pleasure at all from anything at all to do with teaching, except perhaps for having the entire summer away from all you sniveling brats. Every year I get stuck with a bigger and bigger batch of buffoons than last time, all of you so utterly cocksure that you need taking down a peg or two.

"But perhaps you're right; perhaps I _should_ ignore Longbottom, and let him melt yet another cauldron, letting dangerous half-finished potion splatter everywhere, and have to sort out the damages from that? Perhaps I _should_ focus more on you, Mr. Potter, and micromanage your every movement?"

"Sure, go ahead. Just leave Neville alone."

Snape looked like he was (sarcastically) considering Al's words.

"No, I think I'll do both. I'll continue to keep my eye on Longbottom for as long as I have the idiot in my class, and then I shall do the same for you, Potter. Yes, that's what I'll do."

Al frowned. "Oh I get it now. Like the old saying goes, 'Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.'"

Snape surged forward like a striking cobra, making Al back up into his cauldron.

"I will have you know, _Potter_ , that I have not one, but _several_ Masteries in Potioneering, which is the highest qualification one can possibly have, and takes _years_ of intensive labor to achieve, so my title of Potions Master is no mere formality. I can brew potions in my sleep that are so complex it normally takes a team of wizards working together to make them, potions you've never even heard of. If things in my life had gone just a little differently, I could have become a professional potioneer, inventing potions that would echo through the annals of history, and be able to retire with a fortune to rival that of the Malfoys. But instead, I am stuck here in this blasted school, surrounded by utter buffoons and shrieking pre- and post- pubescent little monsters all day, attempting to fill your brains with something more substantial than cobwebs, whilst simultaneously trying to stop idiots like Longbottom from destroying the school because they can't be arsed to pay attention and follow simple instructions! Then I spend every day keeping track of the Headache Cure potions I've taken during the day so I don't accidentally poison myself from overuse. So don't you stand there thinking you know what I'm about, Potter, because you don't have a clue, and you had better pray that you never come to understand what my life is like, because let me tell you, it is utter _**Hell**_ **.** _"_

Al just stood there gaping at him like a fish out of water.

Snape spun on his heel and stalked off to the front of the classroom, leaning on his desk with a glare.

 _"_ And if you don't want more detentions, Potter, I suggest you sit down and get to work before your potion becomes even worse than Longbottom's."

Al nodded, sitting down.

"I've seen Snape pretty angry before, mate, but that was bloody terrifying that was," Ron later said as they left the classroom.

"Yeah, I know. But now I kinda feel sorry for the git. Sounds like he'd rather be doing literally anything but teaching."

"Uh huh. Upside, though, is he never did go back to Neville. At least, not til his cauldron melted, anyway. Even then, he just seemed more tired than anything else."

Al nodded absently.

At lunch, Seamus Finnigan leaned over toward Al and said, "By the way, forgot to tell you in all the hubbub earlier, but the Daily Prophet this morning reckons Sirius Black was spotted."

"Where?" Ron and Al asked. Over at the Slytherin table, Malfoy looked up with interest.

"Not too far from here," said Seamus, who looked excited. "It was a Muggle who saw him. 'Course, she didn't really understand. The Muggles think he's just an ordinary criminal, don't they? So she phoned the telephone hot line. By the time the Ministry of Magic got there, he was gone."

"Not too far from here … ," Ron repeated, looking significantly at Al. Then he looked behind Al and glared. "What do you want, Malfoy?"

Malfoy was regarding Al malevolently.

"Thinking of taking him on yourself, Potty?"

Al raised an eyebrow. "What?"

Malfoy's thin mouth was curving in a mean smile.

"Of course, if it was me," he said quietly, "I'd have done something before now. I wouldn't be staying in school like a good boy, I'd be out there looking for him."

"What are you talking about, Malfoy?" said Ron roughly.

"Don't you _know,_ Potter?" breathed Malfoy, his pale eyes narrowed.

"Know what?"

Malfoy let out a low, sneering laugh.

"Maybe you'd rather not risk your neck," he said. "Want to leave it to the dementors, do you? But if it was me, I'd want revenge. I'd hunt him down myself."

"Revenge? On who? Why? What the bloody Hell are you on about?"

"Trouble, boys?" McGonagall's voice interrupted.

"No, Professor," Malfoy said smugly. "Just telling Potter here I accepted his... rather interesting apology. Just spelling out for him what I thought about it, you know."

"Well good. Now back to your own table, Mr. Malfoy."

"Yes, Professor."

Al watched McGonagall go back up to the staff table.

"Now that McGonagall is McGonagone," Al said, eliciting titters of laughter, "anyone have any clue what Malfoy was babbling about? Something about Sirius Black?"

But nobody did. And there wasn't anything else to say about Sirius Black, either. Seamus went back to his food, and Al noticed Hermione looking significantly at him.

"You realize he was telling you he-"

"-figured out my coded message? Yeah, I _did_ pick up on that, funnily enough."

Their next lesson was their first Defense Against the Dark Arts. Everyone arrived on time, but Lupin wasn't there when they got there, so they all sat down and got their books, quills, and parchment out. The class were talking, except for Al who was too busy leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk. It wasn't until then that Hermione noticed that even though Al had been roughly 14 in their first year, he hadn't gotten any older, and looked almost the same age as everyone else in the room.

Professor Lupin came in at last, smiling vaguely and placed his tatty old briefcase on the teacher's desk. Though shabby still, he looked healthier than before. That is, until he spotted Al and nearly had a fit, clutching his heart and jumping back in fear, alarm, and a mix of other emotions Al couldn't sort out. Then he relaxed a little, but continued to grimace weirdly. But unlike the grimace of loathing Snape always gave him, this one was a grimace of pain, self-disgust, confusion, and a different kind of fear. Al raised an eyebrow curiously, taking his feet off the desk to regard Lupin curiously.

"Um... uh..." Lupin said absently as he dropped his briefcase and struggled to pick his things up without his wand, "er... Good, good afternoon class." Lupin pointedly looked away from Al, calming down some more.

"Would you please, uh... please put all your books and papers back in your bags. Today's will be a practical lesson."

A few curious looks were exchanged as the class put away their books. They had never had a practical Defense Against the Dark Arts before, unless you counted the memorable class last year when their old teacher had brought a cageful of pixies to class and set them loose.

"R-right, then," Professor Lupin said, when everyone was ready. "Follow me, please."

They were all puzzled and interested, Alastair even more so than the others. As they followed him out the classroom, Al tried to get closer to the man, who was clearly avoiding him.

They rounded a corner and found Peeves the Poltergiest, who was stuffing chewing gum into keyholes. Peeves looked up when Lupin was a couple feet away, wiggled his curly-toed feet and broke into song.

"Loony, loopy Lupin," Peeves sang "Loony, loopy Lupin, loony, loopy Lupin!"

This was surprising, as Peeves usually showed a modicum of respect to teachers, even if nobody else. But Lupin didn't seem perturbed by this. In fact, he was smiling.

"I'd take that gum out of the keyhole if I were you, Peeves," he said pleasantly. "Mr. Filch won't be able to get in to his brooms."

Peeves paid no attention to Professor Lupin's words, except to blow a loud wet raspberry.

With a sigh, Lupin took out his wand, pointed it at shoulder height, said, _"Waddiwasi,"_ then pointed it at Peeves. The gum flew out of the keyhole and right down Peeve's left nostril; the poltergeist took off, cursing loudly.

"Sweet," Al said.

Lupin's grin faltered a little, but came back up.

"Thank you, Alastair. Shall we proceed?"

When they finally stopped again, they were in the staffroom where he, Ron, and Hermione had heard of Ginny being taken down to the Chamber at the end of last year. Unfortunately, Snape was there, sitting in an armchair, watching them file in. Lupin made to close the door, but Snape got up.

"Leave it open, Lupin. I'd rather not witness this."

Before leaving, Snape paused and turned back to face them.

"Possibly no one's warned you, Lupin, but this class contains Neville Longbottom. I would advise you not to entrust him with anything difficult."

Neville's face went red, and Al glared at Snape. Al opened his mouth to speak, but Lupin beat him to it, which was just as well; Al didn't need any more detentions.

"I was hoping that Neville would assist me with the first stage of the operation," he said, "and I am sure he will perform it admirably."

Neville's face went, if possible, even redder. Snape's lip curled, but he left, shutting the door with a snap.

With that done, Lupin went back to teaching. He had them stand in front of an old wardrobe that was shaking around like something inside was struggling to get out.

"Nothing to worry about," said Professor Lupin calmly because a few people had jumped backward in alarm. "There's a boggart in there."

Most people seemed to feel that this _was_ something to worry about. Neville gave Professor Lupin a look of pure terror, and Seamus Finnigan eyed the now rattling doorknob apprehensively.

"Boggarts like dark, enclosed spaces," said Professor Lupin. "Wardrobes, the gap beneath beds, the cupboards under sinks — I've even met one that had lodged itself in a grandfather clock. _This_ one moved in yesterday afternoon, and I asked the headmaster if the staff would leave it to give my third years some practice.

"So, the first question we must ask ourselves is, what _is_ a boggart?"

To nobody's surprise, Hermione raised her hand.

"It's a shape-shifter," she said. "It can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most."

Lupin kept talking, more about the boggart. Al had Iliana listen in his place as he thought about this. What did he fear the most? If they were covering this in class, and it was a practical lesson, it made sense that there'd be a chance of coming against this thing, so he thought it prudent to be prepared. So what scared him? And how would it respond to them, anyway? There were five different people in one body, and Lupin said groups of people confused boggarts, so would they confuse the boggart all on their own? Or was there enough bleed-through between them to render that moot?

Neville was the first to be given a chance to face the boggart. Curious about Neville's greatest fear, Al lost the thread of his thoughts and watched, and listened. According to Neville, Snape was his greatest fear, which made Al, Iliana, and the others feel a surge of anger on Neville's behalf.

Lupin was talking about putting Boggart-Snape into Neville's grandmother's dress, handbag, and hat. Al felt a little sick at this, and couldn't quite pin down why at first. But then it occurred to him that Lupin was going to use Snape to make a joke out of men in dresses. Now he felt a surge of anger on Harry's behalf, because surely lots of people would, if they knew what the Mirror had showed Harry, think that Harry was a boy in a dress, if he ever felt comfortable to do that. This was not something that would be good for Harry, he knew.

But by the time he'd figured all this out, it was too late; Neville had said " _Ridikkulus_!" and boggart-Snape went from menacing to dressed in women's clothing and looking confused. Al just crossed his arms and glared; he was the only person not laughing.

It was only then that Al realized that the rest of them were immediately taking turns, too, and he had missed a chance to figure out what scared him most. So he got to work. Was it Voldemort? That face in the back of Quirrell's head had been terrifying. But no, that wasn't it. Was it Iliana's fear of being a murderer? No, not that either. He got an image from Harry, that he knew applied to him too: a glistening, rotten, scabbed hand coming out of a cloak; a sucking cold sensation. He – nay, _they_ feared dementors.

 _ **Holy shit! How do you make a dementor less scary?**_

There was no response from anyone else. If there was an answer, it would not come easily.

The boggart changed into one thing after another as each person in class took a turn, being scary and then comical. And the closer they got to Al's turn, the more his brain froze, unable to think of any way to make a dementor comical.

Al saw Ron's turn into a giant spider, then saw it lose its legs. Al's thoughts shook out of their funk just long enough to note he didn't think it being legless made it any less scary, really.

Still, he stepped forward for his turn, but then Lupin jumped in front of him, and instead of becoming a dementor, the boggart became a... some kind of floating white orb. Al looked at it, stunned, and saw a gray pattern on the orb that looked very familiar...

CRACK! The orb became a cockroach. Then Lupin had Neville take another turn to finish it off. He said the spell again, and the thing exploded into a thousand tiny wisps of smoke, and was gone.

"Excellent!" cried Professor Lupin as the class broke into applause. "Excellent, Neville. Well done, everyone. … Let me see … five points to Gryffindor for every person to tackle the boggart — ten for Neville because he did it twice … and five to Hermione," Lupin said.

Then he gave them schoolwork, and they all were dismissed.

Al was still lost in his thoughts, this time lost in the realization that Lupin had deliberately stopped him having a turn. He didn't know why, but he was glad for it. He didn't think the class would have reacted well to a dementor suddenly appearing in class, especially when there were real dementors outside the school at this very moment.

He massaged his head. Despite being mentally off somewhere else most of the class, their empathic sense had been running the whole time, and now that he was out of the room, the headache was beginning to make itself be known. He took a vial of Headache Cure out and drank it before the headache could become a full migraine.

"I wonder why Professor Lupin's frightened of crystal balls?" said Lavender thoughtfully as she passed.

This snapped him out of his funk enough to glance at Hermione, who looked like she had recognized the strange orb as well. But like him, she said nothing.

"That was the best Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson we've ever had, wasn't it?" said Ron excitedly as they made their way back to the classroom to get their bags.

"He seems like a very good teacher," said Hermione approvingly. "But I wish I could have had a turn with the boggart —"

"What would it have been for you?" said Ron, sniggering. "A piece of homework that only got nine out of ten?"

Al opened his mouth to speak, but he stopped, knowing the thing he wanted to say wasn't his to say, not here. Not yet.

 _ **Harry?**_

 _Yes?_

 _ **May I tell Lupin off for that boggart-Snape, if I very carefully don't mention you in any way?**_

There was a pause of almost a minute. Then, quietly, Harry replied: _Yes._

End note: No end notes this time. (This space intentionally left blank.)


	15. Halloween

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 15"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Fifteen: Halloween

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__

It came as no surprise to anyone in Lupin's classes – except maybe Malfoy's lot – that Lupin was becoming very popular. He was clearly an excellent teacher. To say he was the best DADA teacher they'd had wouldn't have been difficult, what with the others lowering the bar so much. He was such a good teacher, though, that nobody minded his patched and frayed appearance. Well, none but Malfoy's lot, of course. Al didn't even mind that – if his hypothesis was correct – the man was a werewolf. But he knew werewolves weren't thought of well in this world; heck, they were listed as magical creatures in his books, not as beings or people. So he kept Lupin's secret. He did not even discuss it with Hermione, whom he thought had also figured it out.

The DADA classes kept getting better, covering all manner of dark and dangerous beastie. And though it was a bit like a second Care of Magical Creatures class now, very few people seemed to mind this.

Of course, Snape had heard about the boggart, and was not happy at all about it. Al very pointedly did not speak during Potions if he could help it, because he agreed with Snape on that, for different reasons. And despite Harry's permission, he had not yet spoken with Lupin about it.

Even though he wasn't speaking in Potions, neither did he let Snape bully Neville. Whenever Al felt that very faint stream of emotion from Snape – who seemed to have some ability to mask his emotions – turn to Neville-related content, Al would have Zoey cause a distraction of some sort with her wandless magic to divert Snape's attention. Nothing major, even though there wasn't a way to prove it was coming from them, but he knew that wouldn't matter. But mostly, they were successful in keeping Snape away from Neville.

What was perhaps most difficult was that even when Al gave the body back to Iliana, whenever they had to go to Divinations, she would be so overwhelmed by the heat that she'd be like an immobile lump, and Trelawney never failed to say or do something that would bring Al out with scathing remarks or worse. He did manage to restrain himself just enough to avoid goading her into giving him more detentions, which was good; if he was in a detention when Iliana was supposed to be training for Quidditch, well, Wood would not be pleased, and Quidditch season was nearly upon them.

Harry still wasn't coming out. He barely responded, either. Al was getting impatient with him, or her, or whatever; Al was convinced Harry wasn't even using this time to think things through, and was getting very close to telling Zoey to force Harry Out the way she'd done with Iliana before.

Care of Magical Creatures was okay. Hagrid didn't seem too pleased to be showing them unicorns, kneazles, and other less impressive creatures, but after the near miss his first class, he had finally gotten some sense for now. How long it would last before he was back to monsters, though, was anyone's guess.

On their first practice in early October, Iliana got her things together and went to the pitch, getting dressed. She walked onto the pitch to witness Oliver Wood waiting for everyone to approach so he could speak with them. She blushed just a little, as she still fancied him some, and hadn't seen him since last year. But that was the extent of her reaction to him. At 17 years old, he was nearly graduated, and if anyone had forgotten this, Wood sure made sure to remind them when he kept dejectedly bemoaning the fact that this was his last year to win the Quidditch Cup. As such, his pre-practice pep talk seemed more for him than for them.

Full of determination, the team started training sessions, three evenings a week. The weather was getting colder and wetter, the nights darker, but no amount of mud, wind, or rain could tarnish Iliana's wonderful vision of finally winning the huge, silver Quidditch Cup.

After one of these practices, the Griffindor common room was abuzz.

"What's up?" she asked Ron.

"First Hogsmeade weekend," Ron explained, pointing at the notice. "On Halloween."

"Great," she said without enthusiasm, sitting down with a fwump.

Seeming to read her mind, Hermione said, "I'm sure you'll be able to go next time. They're bound to catch Black soon. He's been sighted once already."

"Black's not fool enough to try anything in Hogsmeade," said Ron. "Ask McGonagall if you can go this time, Iliana. The next one might not be for ages."

Iliana laughed without humor. "Right. He killed 13 people with a single curse, broke out of Azkaban to kill me, and you think a few students and villagers are going to scare him off? I have about as much chance of going as Malfoy has of not being a git. At least until they catch him again."

Ron kept trying to get her to ask McGonagall, but she ignored him; she was certain there was no chance, until Black was back in captivity. She just sat there, watching Crookshanks be praised by Hermione for catching a spider, and Ron's disgust.

Crookshanks was still staring unblinkingly at Ron, flicking the end of his bushy tail. Then, without warning, he pounced.

"OY!" Ron roared, seizing his bag as Crookshanks sank four sets of claws deep inside it and began tearing ferociously. "GET OFF, YOU STUPID ANIMAL!"

Ron tried to pull the bag away from Crookshanks, but Crookshanks clung on, spitting and slashing.

"Ron, don't hurt him!" squealed Hermione; the whole common room was watching; Ron whirled the bag around, Crookshanks still clinging to it, and Scabbers came flying out of the top —

"CATCH THAT CAT!" Ron yelled as Crookshanks freed himself from the remnants of the bag, sprang over the table, and chased after the terrified Scabbers.

 _"Accio_ rat," Iliana said, her wand in her hand. But it didn't work. She frowned in confusion. She'd mastered that one weeks ago, after reading about it; it should be working.

 _"Accio_ Scabbers," she said, and this time the rat flew from his hiding place into her hands. With another wave of her wand, she Impeded Crookshanks from getting any closer.

Ron came over to claim Scabbers, and Hermione to claim Crookshanks. The two friends fought some more about how Crookshanks kept targeting Scabbers. Iliana said nothing, but privately thought Ron was right; there _was_ something odd about the cat. She could sense his emotions, which she could only do with Crookshanks and Scabbers, and no other animals. Not even Hedwig, clever as she was, emitted anything they could pick up on with their empathic power.

When Ron and Hermione left, Crookshanks was still there. Iliana stared at the cat. The cat stared back.

"I reckon Ron is right about you," she said. "I can't put my finger on it, but there's something weird about you. I can feel your emotions, for one."

The cat turned its head. Though Iliana could sense his emotions, she couldn't really make much of them. They weren't as strong as Scabbers' emotions, and it was like the cat's emotions were more... more pensive, almost. Which she supposed made sense; cats are smarter than rats, after all.

Ron and Hermione were still at odds the next day, barely talking. Iliana was having a hard time focusing on that or their work in Herbology, though, because Al and Zoey and Harry were having an argument; a heated one. It was very disruptive to her thinking, having them shouting at one another inside her head.

The argument was so distracting that later, at Transfiguration, she barely noticed the conversation with Lavender, who had been crying, but she got the gist. Hermione was sounding almost like Al with her cold, cruel logic against Trelawney having somehow predicted the death of Lavender's pet rabbit.

Nor did she hear much of McGonagall's stuff about Hogsmeade forms. In fact, as Ron made to get her attention, she was massaging her head, but the headache on the horizon was from the fight, not the empath thing.

The fight finally stopped, but nothing was resolved. Iliana took a Headache Cure and followed Ron to the Common Room.

On Halloween morning, Iliana woke up and had breakfast, feeling sad she couldn't go to Hogsmeade, but acted normally enough. Then she saw her friends off before they left.

"Staying here, Potter?" shouted Malfoy, who was standing in line with Crabbe and Goyle. "Scared of passing the dementors?"

She ignored the git, and Al's internal comment about Malfoy not needing to fear them because he didn't have a soul to suck out.

Not knowing what to do with herself, she decided to go call on Lupin. She went to his office, thinking it was best that she talk to the man instead of Al, since they still hadn't done so.

"Iliana?" came Lupin's voice as she approached the open door. "What are you doing here?" he asked kindly. "Where are Ron and Hermione?"

"At Hogsmeade," she said.

"Ah. Why don't you come in, Iliana. I've just taken delivery of a grindylow for our next lesson."

"A what?"

She went in, and saw a large tank of water in one corner, and the sickly green creature with sharp horns inside.

"Water demon," said Lupin. "We shouldn't have much difficulty with him, not after the kappas. The trick is to break his grip. You notice the abnormally long fingers? Strong, but very brittle."

The grindylow bared its green teeth and then buried itself in a tangle of weeds in a corner.

"Cup of tea?" Lupin said, looking around for his kettle. "I was just thinking of making one."

"All right," she said.

"Sit down," said Lupin, taking the lid off a dusty tin. "I've only got teabags, I'm afraid — but I daresay you've had enough of tea leaves?"

Iliana looked at him. Lupin's eyes were twinkling.

"So you heard about that?"

"Yes. And Al's rather interesting commentary, and subsequent detentions." He chuckled, looking pensive. "You're not worried, are you?"

"Not even a little. Al's right, she's a fraud. I doubt we'll learn anything there."

Lupin chuckled.

"I did come to talk with you, though. That boggart of Neville's. You oughtn't've done that."

"Ah, yes. I did hear about Professor Snape's reactions to that. It was childish of me, I know, but after that dig on Neville, I'm afraid I couldn't resist a little dig of my own, for nostalgia's sake."

"Wait, you went to school with Snape?"

"Yes. And we did not get along very well, I'm afraid."

"Interesting. But not why I wanted to berate you for that boggart."

"Oh?"

"You made 'man in a dress' into a joke, without stopping to think that there might be people in the room who might be hurt by that."

"Do you mean transgender students?" he asked.

"Yeah, that's the term. You can't tell by looking, you know. Especially if they're closeted."

"True. Well I'm sorry about that, I wasn't thinking about that possibility. I'll try to be better in future."

She smiled. "I'm glad you're not asking why I have that concern."

"Yes, well, it's really none of my business, I know."

They sipped their tea for a few minutes before speaking again.

"So," Lupin said. "I've met you, and Alastair. I haven't met Zoey or Tier yet. But I was really hoping to see Harry."

Something in his emotions clued her in to something.

"You knew our parents, didn't you?"

He blinked. "How on earth did you know that?"

She sighed, and explained about Al's heart-reading, and the empathic sense it had mutated into over the summer.

"Fascinating. So you deduced that from my emotions?"

"Yes. Sadness, but an old sadness, bittersweet. And a longing, to see an old friend again."

"Yes, your father and I were good friends. Your mother and I knew each other as well, but less so. And you do indeed look like your mother, Iliana; but your father's eyes. And I've heard the reverse is true for Harry."

Iliana smiled and nodded. She opened her mouth to speak again, but a sudden wrenching in her gut made her drop her cup and double over in pain. Lupin stood up with a shot, but before he could say anything himself, suddenly she was no longer there; Harry was in her place. There hadn't even been any glow at all.

# _ **What just happened?**_ **#** Iliana demanded of the others. # _ **A little warning would've been nice, Zoey!**_ **#**

 _It wasn't MEeeeeEeEEee!_ Zoey shot back, crying.

 _ **Don't look at me, either!**_ Al complained.

She poked a bit more, but neither Harry nor Tier had done it, either.

"Harry? Is Iliana alright? She looked like she was in pain before..."

"P-professor Lupin," Harry said in bewilderment, looking around. He'd been as far down in their shared mind as he could go, a moment ago.

"The last thing I remember was fighting with Al and Zoey, then hiding from them. But," he said, accessing their collective memory, "that was yesterday."

After he recovered more of his wits, Harry said, "I don't know what happened. None of us do. We usually only switch places with strong emotions, but I was... asleep, I guess you could say, until just now. And the only other way to switch, that we know of, is for Zoey to force things, but she's just as confused as the rest of us."

"Well however it happened," Lupin said, sitting down again at last, "I'm glad to meet you at last. I don't think I've seen you at all before now."

"Um, yeah. I... I've been hiding."

"Why is that?"

"I... I'd rather not talk about it. Just... thinking about stuff."

Harry pointed his wand at Iliana's broken teacup and repaired it. Lupin put another teabag in and poured him some more water. Harry sipped the tea, getting used to being out again.

At long last, in search of something normal to say or do, Harry spoke.

"Why did you stop us fighting the boggart?"

Lupin raised his eyebrows.

"I would have thought that was obvious, Harry," he said, sounding surprised.

"What? Why?"

"Well," said Lupin, frowning slightly, "I assumed that if the boggart faced you, it would assume the shape of Lord Voldemort."

Harry stared. Not only was this the last answer he'd expected, but Lupin had said Voldemort's name. The only person Harry had ever heard say the name aloud (apart from him and the others) was Professor Dumbledore.

"Clearly, I was wrong," said Lupin, still frowning at Harry. "But I didn't think it a good idea for Lord Voldemort to materialize in the staffroom. I imagined that people would panic."

"That makes sense," Harry said, remembering Al's thoughts on it from before. "And just as well, I suppose, because all we could think of was the dementors."

"I see," said Lupin thoughtfully. "Well, well … I'm impressed." He smiled slightly at the look of surprise on Harry's face. "That suggests that what you fear most of all is — fear. Very wise, Harry."

 _ **Wise, nothing; they're like walking corpses in black robes, the nasty-ass things.**_

Harry chuckled. At Lupin's confused look, he explained, "Al said it wasn't wisdom, it's because they're ugly and nasty, like walking corpses."

"Ah. So you've been thinking that I didn't believe you capable of fighting the boggart?" said Lupin shrewdly.

"I guess so. I mean, they made Iliana faint. And we're so interconnected, I doubt any of the rest of us would have a different reaction. You know, Professor Lupin, about the dementors-"

He was interrupted by a knock on the door.

"Come in," called Lupin.

The door opened, and in came Snape. He was carrying a goblet, which was smoking faintly, and stopped at the sight of Harry, his black eyes narrowing.

"Ah, Severus," said Lupin, smiling. "Thanks very much. Could you leave it here on the desk for me?"

"I heard a noise earlier, like a girl in pain," Snape said, regarding Lupin with suspicion.

"That was Iliana," Harry explained. "She was talking with Lupin, and all of a sudden there was a sudden pain in her gut, and she disappeared, and I took her place."

"I see," said Snape. "Well seeing as she _is_ a thirteen-year-old girl, Potter, I expect she should get used to abdominal cramps. Have her talk with Madam Pomfrey the next time she make an appearance; there are potions that can make the _monthly cycle_ ," he gave Lupin a pointed look, "much easier to bear."

Harry's face turned bright red. Snape was talking about, if their reading was right, Iliana having her menses. Could the explanation really be that simple? Had her mind panicked at the sudden pain and forced a switch to someone who didn't have to deal with that problem?

"Yes, Professor, I will."

"Good," Snape said, in a tone of voice that suggested he didn't care if Harry followed his advice or not.

"As to you, Lupin," he said, finally putting down the smoking goblet on Lupin's desk, "you should drink that directly. I made an entire cauldronful of it if you need more."

"I should probably take some again tomorrow. Thanks very much, Severus."

"Not at all," said Snape, but there was a look in his eye Harry didn't like. He backed out of the room, unsmiling and watchful.

Harry looked curiously at the goblet. Lupin smiled.

"Professor Snape has very kindly concocted a potion for me," he said. "I have never been much of a potion-brewer and this one is particularly complex." He picked up the goblet and sniffed it. "Pity sugar makes it useless," he added, taking a sip and shuddering.

"You've just admitted you two were less than friendly in school, and you've recently re-initiated hostilities, yet you're just going to drink something he's given you?"

"I've been feeling a bit off-color," he said. "This potion is the only thing that helps. I am very lucky to be working alongside Professor Snape; there aren't many wizards who are up to making it. Dumbledore trusts Professor Snape to make it to specs, and I trust Dumbledore."

He drank the rest, and shuddered.

"Disgusting," he said again.

Harry shut the door with his wand, and cast some privacy spells.

"Professor Lupin?"

"Yes, Harry?"

"Does this potion, by chance, have anything to do with you being a werewolf?"

Lupin nearly dropped the goblet.

"How did you-?"

"Moon," Harry said. "Your boggart is the full moon; Al recognized it. And we've been checking. We've only been here a couple months, but your condition deteriorates as the full moon approaches."

"Well, you're not running away, or looking nervous. Am I to take it you don't mind my being a werewolf?"

"I figure Dumbledore must know, and have some plan in place to keep you safe. And I trust Dumbledore, too. Also, Al's heart-reading power tells us you're trustworthy."

A surge of mixed emotions came from Lupin. But on the outside, Lupin smiled.

"Just like your mother and father," he said. "They, too, knew what I was, and didn't mind. Your father knew during school, and became my friend anyway. Still, please don't tell anyone else. The staff know already, including Professor Snape, but I'd prefer the news not make it back to any parents."

"You have my word to keep your secret. I should warn you, though, I think Hermione figured it out, too. She doesn't seem to mind either, but I don't know for sure. We didn't discuss it with her."

"Thank you for telling me this, Harry," Lupin said with a smile. "Now, fun as this has been, I'm afraid I have work to finish before the full moon. I'll see you at the feast later."

The empty goblet was still smoking.

When they got back from Hogsmeade, Ron and Hermione dumped a load of sweets from Honeydukes at his lap, to make up for him not being able to go.

"Harry!" Ron had said. "Glad to see you again, mate. Finally come out of hiding?"

"Not by choice, exactly. No, it's not like that, I just..." he paused, then explained what had happened in Lupin's office. He left out the part about the goblet of potion, and about Lupin being a werewolf, but he did mention that Snape stopped by to drop something off for Lupin, and that the hook-nosed teacher had commented on hearing Iliana's shout, and his thoughts on the cause.

"Oh," Ron said, getting oddly quiet all of a sudden, his ears reddening. Then he launched into an explanation all about everything they'd seen and done in Hogsmeade. Harry wasn't fooled by the sudden change of subject, and neither – apparently – was Hermione, who gave him a Significant Look, but said nothing except to add to Ron's topic.

Hermione checked her watch.

"We'd better go down, you know, the feast'll be starting in five minutes. …" They hurried through the portrait hole and into the crowd, and Hermione let Ron get ahead of her and Harry, whispering at Harry.

"Snape might be right, Harry; you should definitely have her go see Madam Pomfrey. I, uh... I started getting mine last month. The potions she has really do wonders. Doesn't stop the bleeding, but takes away all the pain."

Harry shrugged, but didn't say anything. They were both quiet the rest of the way to the Great Hall, until they saw all the decorations and food.

The food was delicious of course. Harry let Aqua out of his robes to eat a sausage. Everyone who could see it laughed at the small snake swallowing the enormous sausage.

Along with food, there was entertainment provided by the school ghosts, like formation gliding, and Sir Nicolas telling them all about his botched beheading. It all left Harry in such a good mood that even Malfoy shouting to him about the dementors didn't bother him. Al made an internal comment of "Get new material, Malfoy," but Harry didn't let Al speak it aloud.

Harry and his two best friends followed the rest of the Griffindors back to Griffindor Tower, but they were stopped at the portrait hole.

"Why's nobody going in?" Ron asked.

Ron's brother Percy, who was Head Boy and a Prefect, came pompously through them all to the front, complaining about everyone forgetting the password, but when he got up there, he immediately called for Dumbledore in an anxious voice.

As it turned out, the Fat Lady – the painting who guarded the entrance to the common room – was missing, her portrait torn to ribbons. Everyone was just about to search other portraits for her, at Dumbledore's command, when Peeves the Poltergeist laughingly informed the headmaster that she had run off. The headmaster questioned the poltergeist further, and finally Peeves said something truly useful.

"Ashamed, Your Headship, sir. Doesn't want to be seen. She's a horrible mess. Saw her running through the landscape up on the fourth floor, sir, dodging between the trees. Crying something dreadful," he said happily. "Poor thing," he added unconvincingly.

"Did she say who did it?" said Dumbledore quietly.

"Oh yes, Professorhead," said Peeves, with the air of one cradling a large bombshell in his arms. "He got very angry when she wouldn't let him in, you see." Peeves flipped over and grinned at Dumbledore from between his own legs. "Nasty temper he's got, that Sirius Black."

Later, when everyone in the school was locked into the Great Hall to spend the night in sleeping bags while the teachers scoured the castle for Sirius Black, Harry, Ron, and Hermione discussed how he could have gotten into the school. Like Hermione, Harry thought it odd that the escaped convict had gone into the Tower at a time when nobody would be there. If the man was clever enough to disguise himself while on the run – without a wand, most likely, then he should be clever enough to find a calendar somewhere and keep track of the days. But maybe Azkaban had addled his mind?

However he got in, Hermione reminded them all that he couldn't have Apparated in, because "it's not possible to Apparate on the school grounds." Though Harry privately knew that wasn't quite true; House Elves did it all the time. He just doubted a House Elf would help an escaped prisoner. Especially one that was wanted for murder.

The next day, the Fat Lady's damaged portrait was replaced, until she could be restored, by the horrible little knight, Sir Cadogan and his fat pony. This was less than ideal, since the knight changed the password several times a day, challenged people to fights, and generally made an ass of himself, but he was apparently the only portrait that would do the job after what happened to the Fat Lady.

Sir Cadogan, however, was the least of Harry's worries. He was now being closely watched. Teachers found excuses to walk along corridors with him, and Percy Weasley (acting, Harry suspected, on his mother's orders) was tailing him everywhere like an extremely pompous guard dog. To cap it all, Professor McGonagall summoned Harry into her office, with such a somber expression on her face Harry thought someone must have died.

"There's no point hiding it from you any longer, Potter," she said in a very serious voice. "I know this will come as a shock to you, but Sirius Black —"

"I know he's after me," said Harry wearily. "We worked that out the day before term started."

"What? How?" McGonagall asked.

"Between Al's heart-reading, our empathic sense, Ron's dad wearing his heart on his sleeve and being bad at lying, and there being five of us, it wasn't difficult."

Professor McGonagall seemed very taken aback. She stared at Harry for a moment or two, then said, "I see! Well, in that case, Potter, you'll understand why I don't think it's a good idea for Iliana to be practicing Quidditch in the evenings. Out on the field with only your team members, it's very exposed, Potter —"

"We've got our first match on Saturday!" said Iliana in Harry's voice, outraged. "I've got to train, Professor!" She got so emotional at this, that they transformed again, into Iliana.

Thankfully, Professor McGonagall relented, on the condition that Madam Hooch oversee their practices.

As McGonagall left, Iliana decided that while she was out, she may as well go to the Hospital Wing and talk with Madam Pomfrey.

"Ah, Miss Potter. What is it now? Broken arm? Concussion?" the matron asked when she entered.

"Um, no. It's... a bit more personal."

The matron gave her a searching look, then pulled some curtains around them and cast some privacy spells on the curtains. When this was done, she finally spoke again.

"So, Miss Potter, is it that time of the month then? Is this your first time?"

"Well, about that. I don't actually know what happened. I was having tea with Professor Lupin on Halloween afternoon, when suddenly there was a sharp pain in my gut, and we suddenly transformed. So I don't know if there was any, um... bleeding."

"And where was this pain located?"

Iliana put her hand where it had been. The matron frowned thoughtfully.

"Well, Miss Potter, that's much too high to be your uterus. More likely a stomachache. Did you have anything to eat with tea?"

"No, just that."

Madam Pomfrey cast a bunch of diagnostic spells on her, and took some other tests. In the end, she sighed resignedly.

"Well, I don't know what it could have been, aside from stomachache, but there's no sign of anything wrong. There's also no sign you've started your menses yet. But with your unique situation, it might be that anything wrong with you was reversed when you transformed.

"However," she said, getting some things out of a cupboard and handing them to Iliana, "if you should find your time of the month has come at last, here are some pads and potions to help you through it. And if you need more, there's a red cupboard in the next room full of relevant supplies. It's accessible at all times, so girls can come and go without needing to go through the embarrassment of asking someone for them."

Iliana nodded, putting the things in her bag.

"If you have any other problems, come to me right away. It's entirely possible your unique condition may give you health complaints the likes of which nobody can predict."

"Thank you, Madam Pomfrey."

As their first Quidditch match approached, the weather got horrible, with horrid thunderstorms. They kept on practicing, though. But then on their final training session before the match, Wood dropped a bombshell.

"We're not playing Slytherin!" he told them, looking very angry. "Flint's just been to see me. We're playing Hufflepuff instead."

"WHAT? Why?" chorused the rest of the team.

"Supposedly, Malfoy came down with the flu, and can't play."

"He's just faking it! Doesn't want to play in this weather."

"Well that's his loss, then, Oliver," Iliana said. "He's trying to wrong-foot us, but it isn't going to help him. We'll trounce Hufflepuff the way we always do."

"No! We can't get overconfident. We've spent all this time practicing for Slytherin, and their playing style is much different than Hufflepuff's! And these weather conditions are completely different, too."

Iliana couldn't take Wood's increasing hysteria, and redirected her thoughts to picture the images she'd seen when lost in Luna's energy. But the wave of anxiety coming off Wood was just getting worse, she felt it buffeting her aura. Before it could do any damage, she took Oliver Wood's hand in hers; just like that, the anxiety stopped growing, and began to shrink.

Everyone was staring at her. So she decided to break the tension.

"Oliver, don't worry. We'll show Malfoy he can't wrong-foot us. We'll win."

She let go of his hand.

It was all well and good to tell Oliver that they would win, but as they got closer to the match, she began to have doubts. She had this new gift, and it made their days difficult at times, all those emotions in the castle, especially in large groups. And everyone would be turning up to see the match. How was she supposed to play Quidditch when the press of all those minds, with their heightened emotions, would likely overwhelm her?

Towards that end, she began brewing up simple headache cures for herself to take during the match if she needed to, as well as looking up and brewing the Calming Draught, on the idea that if her own emotions were calmed by the potion, that the emotions of the other people would just sort of wash over her without causing any harm. It was also fortuitous that she'd stumbled on summoning the memory of Luna's energy as a sort of shield, too. Of course, the main problem with all these solutions was that calm, languid energy wasn't exactly useful during a Quidditch game. So she would have to save these solutions for after the game, or only use it in case of emergency.

A solution she'd been working on for another problem, if the weather got no better, was trying to see if Tier could activate his magical force-field while still letting her be in charge of the body. She had only a modicum of success with this, in the limited time she had to practice, but it was enough that almost half the wind and rain coming at them was stopped in a bubble around them. Worried that this might disqualify them, she talked with Madam Hooch first, and was told that as long as she didn't use it on purpose to bump into other players, then it was permissible.

Wood kept stopping her in the halls that day at school to give her hints on how to play against Hufflepuff, something that annoyed her, but she tolerated it. Still, it made her late for DADA class. She'd been running through the corridors to get there on time, risking Filch's wrath, and skidded to a halt before popping into the classroom.

"Sorry I'm late, Professor Lupin, I-" she stopped, as Lupin wasn't there at his desk. Snape was.

"Oh, Professor Snape. Sorry I was late-"

"I don't care, silly girl! You are ten minutes late for class. Let's make it ten points from Griffindor, then. Now sit down."

She nodded and sat down. She knew why Lupin wasn't here, but of course she couldn't say. She did look at Hermione, though; the other girl didn't seem surprised, either. But of course, that could be because Hermione was never late for anything.

"As I was saying before Potter interrupted," Snape said, "Professor Lupin has not left any record of the topics you have covered so far —"

"Please, sir, we've done boggarts, Red Caps, kappas, and grindylows," said Hermione quickly, "and we're just about to start —"

"Be quiet," said Snape coldly. "I did not ask for information. I was merely commenting on Professor Lupin's lack of organization."

Iliana stared agog at Hermione. It was unlike her to speak out of turn. She hadn't even raised her hand. Granted, Snape never called on her if he could help it, so that might've explained it. Still, it was odd.

"He's the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher we've ever had," said Dean Thomas boldly, and there was a murmur of agreement from the rest of the class. Snape looked more menacing than ever.

"You are easily satisfied. Lupin is hardly overtaxing you — I would expect first years to be able to deal with Red Caps and grindylows. Today we shall discuss —"

Iliana watched his actions as he appeared to flip casually through the book to the back, to werewolves. When he got there, she knew he'd planned to go there all along. He was trying to out Lupin!

"But, sir," said Hermione, seemingly unable to restrain herself, "we're not supposed to do werewolves yet, we're due to start hinkypunks —"

"Miss Granger," said Snape in a voice of deadly calm, "I was under the impression that I am teaching this lesson, not you. And I am telling you all to turn to page 394." He glanced around again. " _All_ of you! _Now_!"

 _ **I wonder if I'm being a bad influence on Hermione, with all my back-talking at that old fraud?**_

# _ **Probably. Now be quiet.**_ **#**

Naturally, Snape ignored Hermione's attempts to raise her hand to answer the question, forcing her to speak out of turn again. The others were also being argumentative. Iliana wondered if she should join in to deflect suspicion, or just remain quiet. After thinking on it briefly, she realized she didn't want to risk getting a detention this close to the game, so she remained quiet.

Which is a decision that flew right out the window when Snape called Hermione an insufferable know-it-all. Hermione's eyes barely began to water with embarrassed tears before she and a dozen other people were standing up, berating Snape for bullying a student. Ron spoke the loudest, and got a detention for his trouble. This made everyone shut up for the rest of the class, though Iliana kept glaring at the sallow git whenever she could, wondering if they could get away with Zoey turning him into a maggot.

Snape, for his part, handed back their homework and loudly criticized it as he did. Then he assigned a long essay on werewolves, which didn't surprise Iliana at all.

As they left the class, Iliana growled in rage at Snape. "Honestly, why is he even a teacher? He's the most horrible person I've met, not counting the Dursleys. Great bullying git, I'm going to complain to Dumbledore about him. Not that it'll probably help much. Dumbledore has to know what Snape is like by now; he's been teaching for like, 12 years or so. And honestly, I can't figure out why Snape hates Lupin so much."

This was true; sure, Snape knew he was a werewolf, but there had to be more to it than that. This wasn't fear, or simple distrust, it was loathing. It was personal.

"Me neither," said Hermione. "But I hope Lupin gets better soon."

"Oh, I think he will," Iliana said absently.

"What do you mean?" Hermione said, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

But before Iliana could answer, Ron stormed up to them.

"Do you know what that wanker is making me do? I've got to scrub out the bedpans in the hospital wing. _Without magic_!" He was breathing deeply, his fists clenched. "Why couldn't Black have hidden in Snape's office, eh? He could have finished him off for us!"

 _ **Yup, he's trying to out Lupin. Lupin won't be in the hospital wing. Dunno where he'd be while transformed, maybe locked in a dungeon?**_

 _What about that potion?_ Harry asked.

 _ **We don't know what that potion does; Lupin never got around to answering us about what it does.**_

 __ _That's a good point._

On the day of the match, Iliana woke up early to Peeves blowing air on her face. After shooting a bunch of hexes at him that wouldn't hurt him, she decided to stay up. She grabbed her Nimbus and left the dormitory. As she did, she felt something furry trying to get in, and managed to stop Crookshanks getting into the dorm.

"What is with you? You can't be a normal cat; your behavior is too strange for a normal cat. What are you up to? Why are you trying to get Scabbers?"

He looked at her. She couldn't see anything in his face, as she didn't speak Cat, but she felt the faint stirring of distrust from him, which seemed to be directed at Scabbers. She frowned at that, not being able to figure out why a cat wouldn't trust a rat, and tossed him out, closing the door behind her.

"Leave Scabbers alone," she said as she pushed him away.

After breakfast, she and everyone else in the team went down to the pitch. Iliana cast the Impervious Charm on her clothes to make them waterproof, a nice little spell she'd discovered in her reading. She taught the charm to the rest of her teammates, so they would all be warm and dry. Then, feeling bad about that, she whispered about it to Cedric Diggory (the Hufflepuff Seeker and team captain) when they began to gather in the middle. Wood gave her a disapproving glare, but she didn't think them being warm and dry while the other team was soaked and cold would do her conscience any good. Of course, the Hufflepuffs were already all wet, but this stopped it getting worse.

She focused on Tier while they waited for Madam Hooch to start the match, and by the time the whistle started, his force-field popped up and kept a lot of the wind and rain off of them, and thus out of their eyes.

She rose fast on her broom, going above the crowd to seek the snitch. Even with all the little tricks she'd employed to help in the weather, she hadn't thought of anything that could help visibility. Even Tier's eyes wouldn't have been able to see in all the rain and lightning. Which, she suddenly thought, ought to have been grounds to postpone the match. But they were there, there was nothing for it but to play. But no sign of gold appeared.

The storm drowned out Lee Jordan's commentary, too, so Oliver Wood had to call a time-out to update everyone on the status of the game. Despite the harsh conditions, the Griffindors were ahead on points. Wood made sure to emphasize to her to find the snitch fast, or else they'd be playing in the rain all night.

"Don't worry, Oliver. Even with Tier's shield and the Impervious Charm, I'm still soaking wet. A lot of this rain is getting into my clothes anyway, even if the clothes themselves are dry. So I don't fancy being here any longer than I have to be."

They went back to playing. She went up in the air again, calling on everyone in the collective to help keep an eye out for the snitch. She took a bludger straight to their shield, and the ball bounced off, but the shield shattered and the wind buffeted them harder, the rain worming its way into their shoes. It was impossible to re-initiate the shield and fly around looking for the snitch at the same time, not without risking falling off their broom, anyway.

Lightning flared, thunder clapped; both way too close for comfort. In the light of the lightning, the stands were illuminated, and they saw a giant black dog standing there in the topmost empty bleachers, looking right at them.

Her hand slipped off her broom, and she almost fell off, the broom dropping several feet. When she got control again and looked back to the same spot, the giant dog was gone.

Iliana's hands were extremely wet, and cold, and numb. She hadn't thought to try the Impervious Spell on her skin, and wasn't sure it could be done, or if it was a wise idea to try.

"Iliana!" Wood cried out in anguish. "Iliana! Behind you!"

She turned around. Diggory was diving for the ground, right at the snitch. Without a moment's more hesitation, she bolted after him. He had a better broom, of course, but she was a better flyer, so she hoped she could beat him to it.

But then the roar of the wind died down, though the wind itself was still going strong. The cold inside her increased. Tier, panicking, came Out, and large bat-like wings sprouted from their back; wings that were immediately jerked backwards by the wind, and one was significantly smaller than the other anyway, so would have been of limited help anyway. He also petrified their hands into a permanent grip on the broom, but as the cold overtook them, and the screaming woman's scream got closer, they fell off the broom anyway, their weight and the wind pulling in opposite directions, snapping the broom in half.

They saw a brief glimpse of dozens of cloaked dementors before falling sideways through the wind like a maple seed caught in a high wind.

" _Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry_!"

" _Stand aside, you silly girl_ … _stand aside, now. …_ "

" _Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead_ —"

The inside of their head was utter bedlam, with numb thoughts going in many different directions and emotions running wild at first, only to slip into the silence of numbness. As a cold, cruel voice laughed mirthlessly, they passed out.

Iliana could hear voices whispering something, but couldn't make out the words. She was aware of being warm and dry on something soft.

"That was the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life," someone said. Ron, by the sound of it.

This brought back memories of the screaming and laughing from earlier, and her eyes snapped open. Then she was aware of pain, and tried to scream; instead, what came out was an inhuman shriek, like something an eagle might make.

Her thoughts felt simpler; they were mostly images, with few words. There were emotions, though; emotions of an intensity she wasn't used to. She felt pinned down by the covers, and fought, roaring and yowling like a wounded animal. But then someone said a spell, and she was forced to hold still, with her mouth open. Someone using an eyedropper put potion down her throat, and she relaxed.

She focused on the words they were saying, determined to know what was going on.

"How are they, Poppy?"

"They should be fine. These wings they manifested were poorly grown when they broke, which complicated things. The bones were the simplest part; it's the muscles and skin that I struggled the most with. Some of the tendons tore as well, and there were multiple dislocations. But for all the damage to the wings, the rest of the body was largely fine. The only other difference I can tell is they have teeth more like those of a wolf than a human. Oh, and there were claws on the fingers, which I trimmed for safety's sake."

"Tier must have panicked when the dementors came, and tried to fly away, only for the wind to yank his wings backwards."

"Well yes, given their behavior when they woke, I would say that's accurate. Tier appears to still be in control. How far away from the pitch were they found, Headmaster?"

"That wind blew them almost all the way to the Whomping Willow. They've very lucky to have not hit that, or their condition might have been much, much worse."

"Agreed."

"Ooooom?" Tier-liana moaned, working their jaw in frustration. "Boooom?"

"Is that language? I didn't know Tier could speak."

"Yeah, he can," Ron said from the doorway. "It's not easy for him, though."

"Thank you, young Mr. Weasley," Dumbledore said. "Tier, can you hear me?"

"Ehth," they answered. "Air esh boom?"

"Are you asking where your Nimbus 2000 is?"

"Ehth."

"I don't know, Tier, I wish I-"

"Headmaster?" Ron asked. "Can we come in?"

"Yes, I think so. But not for long, I'm afraid; Madam Pomfrey still has work to do. Anyway, Tier was just wondering where the Nimbus went."

"It broke in half when you fell, mate," Ron explained. "You missed the Whomping Willow, but the rest of your broom didn't. It's in pieces."

"Oh," they said simply. Then, "Tyair-Laanaa. Dsh... dshuk. Dshdugk, oo'geffer."

"Wait, you're stuck? Is that what you said?"

"Ehth," they said, nodding.

Dumbledore looked fascinated and concerned at the same time.

"How stuck are you? Do you think it's permanent?"

They shook their head. "No. Tempree. Eee ohp. Ooo... ooee... w... we hobp."

Dumbledore stroked his beard, saying to himself, "Fascinating. Even with Iliana fused to him, Tier still struggles to enunciate simple words."

Tier growled in irritation.

"Here," the matron said, with another eye-dropper (this one the size of a turkey baster) in her hand, "have some chocolate. Recovering from the dementor effects might help you get your powers back enough to come unstuck."

She dribbled lukewarm chocolate milk into their mouth, and they began to feel better.

"I find myself wondering how the others are doing," Dumbledore said, still stroking his chin.

"Kay-ahsh," they answered. "Tears. Payn."

Ron looked at them oddly.

"Your voice is so deep, I never noticed before, since you only spoke once before. It's weird, hearing such a deep voice coming from a body that's still mostly Iliana's."

Tier huffed air out of his nose as his only comment.

Despite their condition, their magic seemed to be speeding their healing process enough that Madam Pomfrey let the rest of the Griffindor team in, once Dumbledore left. After all, they were calmer now, alert and awake. Not to mention when she suggested they needed rest, Tier practically roared at her, his hiss was so growly.

"How're you lot doing?" one of the twins asked.

Tier huffed air out his nose again, only this time it sounded more positive.

"Good, good," whichever twin it was said, nodding.

"That was scary, that was," the other twin said. "First those dementors showing up, then your transformation, then you being blown away."

The conversation had turned largely one-sided; Tier had run out of patience for words, and was communicating solely in looks and animal sounds again.

When the inside of their head started going back to normal, Tier found himself in the position of having to relay messages from the others to the people outside. He decided to focus on the most annoying inner voices first. When he started screwing up his face with the effort of getting ready to speak, Ron stopped the others with a raised hand, and they all waited.

"Mm... mm... mmmaaadch? Ooeen or lose?"

"The match? Lost. Diggory caught the snitch before you fell. He tried to call for a rematch, but he won fair and square."

"W... Wood?"

"Still in the showers. We reckon he's trying to drown himself. Oh, not really. He's just really upset."

Tier snorted, as if to say " _He's_ upset?"

"Yeah, well, you know Wood."

Then they started discussing the team's chances to win the cup, even having lost one of the matches, and Tier let them do it. Before long, Madam Pomfrey ushered them out, carefully; but when Tier didn't react, she sighed with relief.

Ron stayed behind, though. And Hermione showed up.

"Dumbledore was really angry," Hermione said in a quavering voice. "He tried to catch you as you fell, of course, but the wind blew you away. Hagrid ran after you instead. Dumbledore shot something silvery at the dementors, and they left at once. Then he went after you, but by then Hagrid had found you, and was carrying you to Dumbledore. Dumbledore made sure the rest of us were okay while that happened."

"Then he magicked you onto a stretcher," said Ron. "And walked up to school with you floating on it. Everyone thought you were, well..."

Tier made a noise like dying, which alarmed the two friends, until they realized he was finishing Ron's sentence.

"How're you feeling, mate? Are you and Iliana still stuck together?"

"They're stuck together?" Hermione said in alarm. "Is it permanent?"

Tier shook his head. He began trying to speak again. Iliana was slipping into the background, they were no longer stuck together, which ironically made it harder for him to speak.

"Uhn shtugk," he finally managed to say, every word a Herculean effort. "Ihnside. Steel stugk een dis form."

Then Tier felt something clunk into place in how they felt, and stretched his powers out. They glowed faintly, and the wings he'd manifested healed completely, growing to the right proportions. He sat up and stretched all their limbs out as far as they would go, almost knocking over Ron in the process.

"Mr. Potter, or Tier, or however you wish to be called," the matron said in annoyance, "please fold up your wings or transform back to normal, just don't do _that_ ; you might knock over something valuable."

Tier nodded, and focused on his power again. The wings glowed faintly, then shrunk and disappeared. They now looked like a normal Iliana, except for their teeth, which Tier didn't show except on accident. He tossed off the covers and got up out of bed. Madam Pomfrey tried to stop him, but he hissed at her and walked out. He preferred his own bed to one in the hospital.

That weekend was difficult, for despite getting enough of his power back to get rid of the wings, they were stuck as Tier all weekend long. He could still make modifications to the body, so he put their teeth back to normal, but by the end of Saturday, he had changed the body's appearance to a male form with brown hair and amber skin. This made things a little easier, once people started getting the message that this individual couldn't speak much, but it caused more problems as well, namely trying to explain who he was without speaking.

And so, on Sunday evening when Iliana returned, Tier was greatly relieved. They transformed right in front of Ron and Hermione, who had been talking with one another while Tier had silently watched.

"Iliana! You're back!" Ron said.

"Yeah, I guess I am."

She stayed there for a few minutes, joining the conversation here and there but largely lost in thought, until finally she got up.

"Gonna go talk with McGonagall," she said. "Be back soon."

Leaving the annoying Sir Cadogan behind, she went looking for McGonagall. She eventually found the woman coming out of the staff room.

"Ah, Ms. Potter, glad to see you're back at last. I don't think anyone was keen on trying to teach a student who is largely mute. Did you need something?"

"Can we talk in your office, Professor?"

"Now? Alright, then. This way."

When they got to McGonagall's office, they both sat down. The professor regarded her expectantly for a few moments before Iliana began to speak at last.

"This weekend gave us a lot of time to think. And, well... it wasn't an easy consensus to come to, but about our dorm arrangements. We need new arrangements; I don't know what we need, exactly, but we do. We're getting older, puberty is upon us. And what's more... Harry's struggling with it, but he's agreed to let me talk about it with you... um... Harry is transgender. He figured it out over the summer, and he's still struggling with what to do about it, but he no longer feels comfortable in the boy's dormitory. I don't know where he _would_ feel comfortable, though."

"I see," said McGonagall kindly. "Well, we do have a number of options for transgender students. What I think might suit you most is that we do have a room or two in each section of the dorms set aside for students who do not feel comfortable lodging with other students for whatever reason. And your situation is complicated enough you might benefit from that. And given the nature of your situation, one of the single-occupancy rooms in the boy's dormitory section may be best."

"Ah. And, uh... what about showers?"

"Those rooms have their own bathrooms, complete with shower."

Something they'd not thought of before came up in their mind then, making Iliana's face twist with emotion.

"Um... that sounds great. There's just one problem. I don't want people to think we're, like, snobs or anti-social or something. And it's gonna be kinda hard to explain a move like that without outing Harry, and he isn't sure about coming out as transgender. I mean, I think he will eventually, but he isn't sure when, or how. He's scared what people will think."

"That is understandable. But keep in mind, the arrangement I've offered will still let you visit your friends."

"I know, but I just don't know if that's enough. I'd need a solid explanation that's plausible and protects Harry."

McGonagall smiled. "Well, if I were in your position, I think I'd tell my friends that as a girl in puberty, I no longer felt comfortable sleeping and changing and showering with boys, but since there are boys in your collective, you don't feel comfortable in the girl's dormitories either. Does that sound like a good excuse to you? After all, unless I'm mistaken, it's true enough in essentials."

Iliana smiled. "Yes, that sounds good. I like that. We'll take your offer."

"When do you want to switch dorms, Ms. Potter?"

"I dunno. Not immediately, though. I think I need to give Ron at least time to get used to the idea. Maybe by Wednesday?"

"If that's what you want. In the meantime, should we go look at this new room to be sure you want it?"

"Alright."

When Iliana came back, Ron looked up and opened his mouth to speak, but stopped when he saw McGonagall. Hermione and others in the room stared as well. They'd only ever seen the professor in the common room during dire emergencies before.

"There's no need to look so scared, Mr. Weasley," she told Ron. "Everyone may rest assured there is nothing serious going on. I am simply showing Ms. Potter something upstairs. Go back to whatever you were doing before I came in."

The two of them went up the stairs of the boy's dormitories, and out of sight. Iliana felt everyone's confusion increase at this, along with a few other emotions, and felt her face grow hot at some of these. But she said nothing, and followed McGonagall to the very back of the dorms, to a door she'd never noticed before. The professor did something to the door with her wand, and suddenly the door felt more welcoming. Then the teacher opened the door and led Iliana in.

She looked around at a room that was smaller than her current dorm room, but big enough it could have held two beds in it, though there was only one there at present. Like the others, it was stone with carpets on the floors and tapestries on the walls. (Even with magic, castles tended to be cold.) It had a fireplace as well, a large wardrobe, and there was a door to a small but adequate bathroom with a sink, a toilet, and a clawed bathtub with a shower attachment and shower curtains that were actual cloth curtains with an Impervious Charm cast on them to keep them dry.

When she looked at the wardrobe again, it began to shake, startling her.

"A boggart," Professor McGonagall said. "Well, that will need to be taken care of before you move in. But otherwise, how do you feel about this room?"

Iliana looked at the bed. Even though it was the only bed in the room, it too had curtains. In all respects, it looked identical to their current bed. Then, spotting the window, she went over and looked out. The view was largely the same, just from a different angle.

"Looks great, Professor."

"So shall I put your move-in date as this Wednesday?"

"Yes, Professor. Barring unforeseen circumstances."

"Good. I shall inform the headmaster and the house elves, and I shall also arrange to have the boggart dealt with."

That done, they went back downstairs, Iliana rejoining Ron and Hermione as McGonagall left to go back to her office or wherever else it was she was going. Her two friends looked at her expectantly.

"What was that all about?" Ron asked.

"Oh. Well... it's just... you know, I'm 13 now, and my body's changing, and I haven't really been feeling comfortable changing and sleeping and showering with a bunch of boys. But there are boys in our collective, too, so I wouldn't feel comfortable in the girl's dormitories, either, so... it turned out there was a third option."

"Really? What's that?"

"Um... well, they have single-occupancy rooms for when there's a need, and-"

"You're getting your own room?" Ron said, agog at the news.

"Um... yeah. And it, uh... has its own bathroom. Complete with shower. And since it's in the boy's dormitories, it's no problem to visit you in your room, or for you to visit mine."

Ron was looking dumbfounded, but Hermione nodded approvingly.

"Good for you. I've never really thought you should be in there with all those boys; last year when you made me stay in your dorm, it was extremely uncomfortable having to change in the bed, I don't blame you at all wanting somewhere more private. I am a little disappointed you're not going to switch to a girl's dorm, but I suppose that could be even worse. What if Alastair or Harry activated the stairs? No, this is the best option."

"Activated the stairs?" Ron asked her in confusion.

"Oh, well, there's a spell on the stairs to the girl's dormitories that detects boys; when it does, an alarm goes off and the stairs turn into a slide. It was put there by the founders, who thought boys were untrustworthy."

"Good to know," Ron said. Then he sighed, and looked at Iliana. "Well, I can't say I'm happy about it. Gonna miss you, mate, but I get it. I've caught myself, er... looking... at some of the older girls. If you were still there when you started sprouting... well, you know... that might be awkward."

Ron's face and ears turned bright red, and he pretended to be reading.

"When are you changing rooms, by the way?" asked Hermione.

"Not til Wednesday. There's still a boggart in the wardrobe."

Though Ron had taken the news surprisingly well, Neville and Seamus took it a bit harder. Neville was sad to see them go, and Seamus came off as mildly offended, but that turned out to be disguising some hurt feelings.

Potions class was difficult, of course. Malfoy was gleeful at Griffindor's defeat, and kept imitating Iliana falling off her broom, and calling her "batty."

Luckily, though, Professor Lupin was back at work, looking worn out but cheerful anyway. The students raised a great ruckus about Snape's treatment of the class, and the essay. With Iliana joining in, Lupin announced that the essay wouldn't be required, but anyone who had already done it could hand it in for extra points; Hermione and Iliana were two of the only people to hand theirs in.

After class, Professor Lupin held Iliana back to talk with her, commiserating with her about the destroyed broomstick, and explaining that the Whomping Willow had been planted the year he'd started Hogwarts. Since their conversation was private, Iliana had to ask...

"Does that tree have something to do with your, um... furry complaint?"

Lupin laughed. "Yes. The Wolfsbane Potion – that potion Snape gave me the other day – hadn't been invented yet, so I had to go somewhere I couldn't hurt anyone or escape during the full moon. There's a secret passageway under that tree that leads to the Shrieking Shack, which is where I went to transform."

"The Shrieking Shack? But isn't it haunted?"

"No. The sounds that used to come there were from me. Separated from humans so I could not bite or scratch them, I bit and scratched myself instead."

Iliana winced. "Sounds horrible."

"It is indeed. The transformation itself is torture, too. The Wolfsbane Potion lets me keep my mind and be a harmless wolf during the full moon, but the agony is almost unbearable. Losing my mind to the beast within is almost a relief by comparison."

Iliana didn't know what to say. After a few moments, she spoke again.

"So did you hear about the dementors, too?"

"Yes, I did. I don't think any of us have seen Professor Dumbledore that angry. They have been growing restless for some time … furious at his refusal to let them inside the grounds. … I suppose they were the reason you fell?"

"Yes," Iliana said. "Why do they affect us so strongly? Is it weakness?"

"No, it's not weakness. Dementors take us to our worst memories, and your worst memories are just more powerful than most people's, since you've been through so much."

"Yeah. The Dursleys alone would be enough for that, I think. Then there's killing Quirrell. But what I see and hear instead... I wasn't even aware it was possible to remember something from one's infancy."

Lupin went stock still.

"What do you mean?"

"When they get near us, we hear... we hear our mum being murdered, by Voldemort," she said, her voice cracking and eyes watering. But instead of crying, she gritted her teeth and looked at Lupin.

"Why did they come to the match?"

"They're getting hungry," said Lupin coolly, shutting his briefcase with a snap. "Dumbledore won't let them into the school, so their supply of human prey has dried up. … I don't think they could resist the large crowd around the Quidditch field. All that excitement … emotions running high … it was their idea of a feast."

"Azkaban must be terrible," Iliana said. "No wonder Dumbledore hates the dementors."

"The fortress is set on a tiny island, way out to sea, but they don't need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they're all trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most of them go mad within weeks."

"Except for Sirius Black," she said quietly.

Lupin's briefcase slipped from the desk; he had to stoop quickly to catch it. But even if that hadn't happened, his emotions were loud enough to her that she looked at him again. He was hiding something, just as Mr. and Mrs. Weasley had. But given that adults tended to lie, she decided it was pointless to ask him to tell the truth.

"Yes," he said, straightening up, "Black must have found a way to fight them. I wouldn't have believed it possible. … Dementors are supposed to drain a wizard of his powers if he is left with them too long."

"You made that one on the train back off. And Dumbledore did the same thing, from what I heard later."

"There are — certain defenses one can use," said Lupin. "But there was only one dementor on the train. The more there are, the more difficult it becomes to resist."

"Defenses? Like what? Can you teach us?"

"I'm no expert in fighting dementors, Iliana. Quite the contrary, in fact."

"But they're dangerous, dementors. And if they come to another match, I need to be able to get to the ground before I pass out, or avoid passing out completely if I can."

Lupin looked into Iliana's determined face, hesitated, then said, "Well … all right. I'll try and help. But it'll have to wait until next term, I'm afraid. I have a lot to do before the holidays. The full moon came at an inconvenient time for me."


	16. Freedom

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 16"

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Sixteen:** **Freedom**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. It's been frustrating me, too, but some things are just too perfect already to change. Which, fair warning, includes most of the conversation Fudge, Hagrid, Flitwick, and McGonagall have in The Three Broomsticks.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__

Tuesday night, Iliana spent a lot of time organizing their things in preparation for moving to the new room. This included opening the trunk and packing and repacking it several times, never satisfied with the results. At one point, she accidentally uncovered the Sneakoscope and it began spinning and whistling, even though the room was empty but for her and Scabbers. Figuring it was indeed on the fritz, she packed it away again, more securely.

It was difficult to sleep that night, knowing the next day after dinner, she'd be moving into the new room. Her mind kept going over what she could do with her own room, the decorations she could put up, the hobbies she could pursue without bothering other people, and the long soaks she could take in her very own bathtub.

Harry was excited as well, and kept adding to this night-time thinking with ideas of his (her) own, like getting a full-length mirror (though one very different in appearance from the Mirror of Erised; they didn't need reminding of that thing), and a magical music player or wizarding wireless box, to explore the wizarding world's music.

In fact, the mirror idea excited Harry so much that they didn't get to sleep until after they'd gotten up to write themselves a note about finding out where to order one from.

Goodbyes the next day were a lot easier than expected in some ways. Partly because Ron was helping Iliana move her trunk, and partly because their former dorm-mates were invited to get a good look at the place, which was her way of showing them that they could come over to visit as long as they bore in mind the door would be locked sometimes.

She was glad to find the wardrobe was boggart-free, and enlisted her friends' help to put robes and Muggle clothes for Alastair in one part of the wardrobe, while she focused on the panties and clothes she had for herself, and a few things of Zoey's, as well.

It took a lot of diplomacy and patience to get rid of her guests enough ahead of time that she could enjoy a bath and some reading before going to sleep, but she managed it. With the door firmly locked with her wand, using a spell she'd read about that couldn't be unlocked with a simple _alohamora_ , she undressed right there in the empty room (first closing the blinds on the windows out of paranoia) and left the bathroom door open as she drew her bath, only closing it when it was plain the draft made the room too cold.

When she came out in her towel, she shivered and grabbed her wand, using it to put a fire in the grate, and casting Warming Charms on every inch of the room before putting the towel away and getting dressed in her PJ's.

But before sitting down to read, she sat at her desk and wrote out an order for the mirror she wanted, using the information she'd gotten from McGonagall earlier in the day. Then she used a simple owl-summoning spell to summon Hedwig, and sent the letter off with her, before sitting down on the bed to read.

Her first night in her new bed was a mixed experience. She was so used to hearing the breathing and occasional snores from four other people that the lack of these sounds made it rather difficult to get to sleep. But she got there eventually, and the warmth from the fire and the Warming Charms helped tremendously with that.

Between her new room and the promise of anti-dementor lessons from Lupin, the Potter collective were feeling pretty good about life. Then Ravenclaw flattened Hufflepuff in Quidditch, which was good for Griffindor's prospects. They couldn't afford to lose any more games, though, so Wood had them practicing hard in the chilly rain that persisted into December. Luckily, though, the dementors stayed away.

Their good mood was somewhat ruined, though, when Professor McGonagall informed them that they were to stay in the castle for Christmas holidays. They'd been looking forward to spending Christmas with the Weasleys, but because of Sirius Black, the Burrow was deemed not safe enough. Even arguing that Black had already gotten into the castle once before didn't help, nor did pointing out that the Burrow was a long way from Hogwarts. The order had apparently come straight from Dumbledore, who was taking no chances with them, now that they weren't with the Dursleys anymore.

Luckily, though, Ron and Hermione stayed behind as well, making excuses that sounded plausible, when the real reason was to keep her and the others company during the holidays.

They also had their new mirror to help them, too. Harry kept coming Out in order to try different things with his/her appearance, like changing hair texture and length, eye color, face shape, body shape, and so on. But since Tier was the only one who could change his appearance at will while Out, this required a lot of transformations and even more willpower, because Harry had to go In then Out again to make even the smallest changes. But Harry was getting quite good at it, and by the time of the last Hogsmeade visit of the term – a day before most people left the school – Harry looked 100% female even when nude, though still not very developed. As to whether this included changes to the internal organs, though, they didn't know.

Because they'd bought so many broomsticks for the school the year before, they were practicing on one of the spares, a black Nimbus 2001. While faster than their previous broom, it felt weird putting it back in the shed instead of taking it to their room. So every now and then, they'd flip through Which Broomstick, thinking about getting a new one, but there was no urgency in it.

The move and the mirror and so on was helping Harry a lot, and so for the first time all term he came Out during classes, his hair slightly longer and much tamer than before. He'd decided to grow his hair long to sort of ease into coming out as transgender. He was concerned how most people would react, especially his friends, and hadn't even told Hermione. In fact, McGonagall was the only person who knew about it. Malfoy and the other Slytherins would no doubt be horrible, but if he could get most people's support, that would help. Also, he was still trying to work out a name.

On the day of the Hogsmeade trip, Harry said goodbye to Ron and Hermione, then went back inside to look for Luna. But halfway along the third-floor corridor, someone was calling quietly to him.

"Psst, Harry!"

It was Fred and George, hiding behind a statue of a humpbacked, one-eyed witch. Harry put his hands on his hips.

"What are you two up to?" he asked. "You'll miss the trip to Hogsmeade."

"The only thing we're up to is giving you a bit of festive cheer before we go. In here," said George, leading Harry into an empty classroom and closing the door.

"Early Christmas present for you lot," George continued.

Fred pulled something from inside his cloak with a flourish and laid it on one of the desks. It was a large, square, very worn piece of parchment with nothing written on it. Harry, suspecting one of Fred and George's jokes, crossed his arms and raised his eyebrow.

"It's a piece of parchment," he said to them.

"No no, it's so much more than that. It's the secret to our success, in fact."

"It's a wrench, giving it to you lot, but we reckon it'll be more useful for you."

"Anyway, we know it by heart. We don't need it anymore."

"Okay, so what's so special about an old piece of parchment?"

" _Old_ piece of parchment!" said Fred, closing his eyes with a grimace as though Harry had mortally offended him. "Explain, George."

Harry listened as the twins described a time during their first year when they'd been in Filch's office for mischief, he'd stepped out, and they stole the parchment from a filing cabinet labeled 'Confiscated and highly dangerous.'

"We don't reckon Filch ever figured out how to use it. But he seemed to suspect what it was."

"And you know how to work it?"

"Oh yes," said Fred, smirking. "This little beauty's taught us more than all the teachers in this school."

"You're winding me up," said Harry, looking at the ragged old bit of parchment.

"Oh, are we?" said George.

He took out his wand, touched the parchment lightly, and said, " _I solemnly swear that I am up to no good._ "

And at once, thin ink lines began to spread like a spider's web from the point that George's wand had touched. They joined each other, they crisscrossed, they fanned into every corner of the parchment; then words began to blossom across the top, great, curly green words, that proclaimed:

 _Messrs. Moony, Wormtail,_ _Padfoot, and_ _Prongs_

 _Purveyors of_ _Aids to Magical Mischief-Makers_

 _are proud to present_

THE MARAUDER'S MAP

It was a map showing every detail of the Hogwarts castle and grounds. But the truly remarkable thing were the tiny ink dots moving around it, each labeled with a name in minuscule writing. Astounded, Harry bent over it. A labeled dot in the top left corner showed that Professor Dumbledore was pacing his study; the caretaker's cat, Mrs. Norris, was prowling the second floor; Luna was in the library; and Peeves the Poltergeist was currently bouncing around the trophy room.

As Harry's eyes traveled up and down the familiar corridors, he noticed something else: a series of hidden passages that led out the castle. According to the twins, several Filch already knew about, one was caved in, another was the one that Harry knew went to the Shrieking Shack but which the twins reckoned was useless, leaving one available that only the three of them knew about, which you got into by opening a secret door built into the statue of the one-eyed old witch.

When the twins had left, Harry stared at the map. Al and Iliana were telling him to report this map, as Black could be getting in through one of these passages, and this map could be like Riddle's diary; but Harry sensed nothing unusual from the map, whereas he had sensed something alive in the diary, and anyway, he was getting cabin fever being cooped up inside all the time, and needed a break. What was more, he could go in disguise.

Careful to make sure nobody would run into him on his way into the passage first, he went out to the statue, touched it with his wand, said, "Dissendium" as the map informed him to do, and climbed in. The opening sealed behind him. He cast a fire-like light onto the floor, and set down the map well away from it. Then he focused on going In. They transformed, becoming Iliana briefly before he came Out again. Only this time, when Harry came Out, he looked completely unrecognizable. He had long, flowing hair that was brown now instead of black, his eyes were blue instead of green, his face was different, his glasses were a different color, and his clothes were different as well. In fact, he now looked like a girl, a girl that bore little resemblance to Harry's usual appearance.

She pulled a compact mirror out of her pocket and looked at herself in it. It was hard to tell in the shivering light of the magical fire, but she thought she looked pretty good, and very different. So she picked up the Map, put out the fire, put away the mirror, and lit her wand, following the path on the map with her eyes as she went along to Honeyduke's.

It was hard to judge how long it took her to get to Honeyduke's, and the thing felt like a long and twisty rabbit burrow, but finally she got to a rise in the passage, then to some stone steps. She paused a moment to rest, as she'd been running part of the way, then climbed the stone steps until her head bumped into a trap door.

Harry stood there, listening, but heard nobody, so she opened it up and peeked out at a cellar full of wooden boxes and crates. She came out the rest of the way, closing the trapdoor and memorizing where it was before going cautiously up the stairs, into the main room of Honeyduke's sweet shop.

It was an amazing sight, with candies of colors and shapes and sizes of all kinds, including many magical candies like Fizzing Whizbees, Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, Ice Mice, and exploding bonbons. She knew that even the magic wouldn't have stopped Dudley from buying whatever he could here; it was truly a wonder to behold.

She spotted the twins and went up to them. They didn't notice her at first, of course, and when they did, they looked at her with the kind of interest that made Harry blush.

"Hey there pretty girl, my name's Fred Weasley. What's yours?"

She suddenly realized these two were the last people she wanted to out herself to, so she came up with a name on the spot, one she'd read in one of her books.

"Um... Adira. I'm Adira Molina," she said, affecting a higher-pitched voice. "Anyway, nice to meet you, but I'm late for a date with my boyfriend," she said, scurrying away, leaving the twins looking disappointed.

She didn't leave the store, though, trusting to its extreme state of crowding to hide her. Instead, she looked for Ron and Hermione. She found them over by shelves marked "Unusual tastes." Ron and Hermione were standing underneath it, examining a tray of blood-flavored lollipops. "Adira" sneaked up behind them.

"Ugh, no, Harry won't want one of those, they're for vampires, I expect," Hermione was saying.

"How about these?" said Ron, shoving a jar of Cockroach Clusters under Hermione's nose.

"Definitely not," said Adira/Harry in her usual voice.

Ron and Hermione jumped, then stared at 'Adira.'

"Harry?" Ron asked, in complete bewilderment. "You're a girl!"

"Call me Adira, Ron. I'm in disguise."

"I'll say."

"Ha—Adira," Hermione said disapprovingly, "how did you get here? And why are you here?"

"Wow, you've learned to Apparate!" Ron said.

"Don't be silly, Ron, you can't Apparate into or out of the school grounds."

"Hermione's right," 'Adira' said, brushing some hair out of her face with her hand. She began to explain about the twins and the Marauder's Map they'd given her.

"How come Fred and George never gave it to _me_!" said Ron, outraged. "I'm their brother!"

"But Ha—Adira isn't going to keep it!" said Hermione, as though the idea were ludicrous. "He... _she's_ going to hand it in to Professor McGonagall, aren't you, 'Adira'?"

"Of course not," Adira said, her face turned upward, deciding not to tell Hermione that Al and Iliana had already raised similar objections.

"Are you mad?" said Ron, goggling at Hermione. "Hand in something that good?"

"If I hand it in, I'll have to say where I got it. Filch would know Fred and George had nicked it," Adira said calmly.

"But what about Sirius Black?" Hermione hissed. "He could be using one of the passages on that map to get into the castle! The teachers have got to know!"

"Filch knows about four of the passages. Another's caved in, another comes out under the Whomping Willow, and the one I just came through... well, the entrance down in the Honeyduke's cellar so seamlessly blends in with the rest of the floor that you'd have to know it was there already."

This did make Adira pause to think, though. What if Black did know the passage was there? Ron, however, cleared his throat significantly, and pointed to a notice pasted on the inside of the sweetshop door.

— BY ORDER OF —

THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC

 _Customers are reminded that until further notice, dementors will be patrolling the streets of Hogsmeade every night after sundown. This measure has been put in place for the safety of Hogsmeade residents and will be lifted upon the recapture of_ _Sirius Black. It is therefore advisable that you complete your shopping well before nightfall._

 _Merry Christmas!_

"See?" said Ron quietly. "I'd like to see Black try and break into Honeydukes with dementors swarming all over the village. Anyway, Hermione, the Honeydukes owners would hear a break-in, wouldn't they? They live over the shop!"

"Yes, but — but —" Hermoine seemed to be struggling to find another problem. "Look, Har—er, Adira still shouldn't be coming into Hogsmeade. She hasn't got a signed form! If anyone finds out, she'll be in so much trouble! And it's not nightfall yet — what if Sirius Black turns up today? Now?"

"I'm in disguise. Fred and George didn't recognize me when I ran into them, which is what prompted me to come up with the name 'Adira Molina.' Granted, I was affecting a different voice at the time. Still, would you have recognized me if I hadn't used my real voice?"

The two of them looked at her more closely. Ron chuckled and agreed that it was a brilliant disguise, her hair hiding the scar on top of everything else. Hermione pouted, which meant she didn't want to admit it was a great disguise.

"And anyway, with all these students and all the snow falling outside, Black would have a hard time spotting my normal form in all this. And I can always become Tier, he could fight."

Hermione still looked worried.

"Are you going to report me?" Adira asked.

"No, of course not, Adira, but honestly-"

Ron immediately pulled Adira over to show her the different sweets available. Adira hadn't thought to bring money, so she couldn't buy anything, but she'd already done her Christmas shopping via owl-order anyway, so she didn't feel too bad about it.

They debated where to go next; there were so many options available, after all. But Adira hadn't brought a cloak, either, and was so cold that they ended up going to The Three Broomsticks instead for something warm to drink. Adira was more than willing; she was so cold that she was afraid Tier was going to make her grow fur if she didn't get into the warm soon. In a few minutes, they were in the small inn, the warmth like a salve.

It was extremely crowded, noisy, warm, and smoky. A curvy sort of woman with a pretty face was serving a bunch of rowdy warlocks up at the bar.

"That's Madam Rosmerta," said Ron. "I'll get the drinks, shall I?" he added, going slightly red.

Adira nodded, understanding. She felt that familiar feeling when she looked at Madam Rosmerta, which she now recognized as meaning she fancied someone. Luckily, her ears and face were already red from the cold. For once, though, Iliana didn't share her feelings for the older woman. However, Iliana _did_ notice a pretty Asian girl at another table, a girl she recognized as being a Ravenclaw, which made Adira feel the same way. Adira looked away pointedly, following Hermione to a small, vacant table between the window and a handsome Christmas tree, which stood next to the fireplace, which was lucky for her. Ron came back five minutes later, carrying three foaming tankards of hot butterbeer.

"Merry Christmas!" he said happily, raising his tankard.

Adira drank deeply. It was the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted and seemed to heat every bit of her from the inside.

A sudden breeze ruffled her hair. The door of the Three Broomsticks had opened again. Adira looked over the rim of her tankard and choked before she remembered she was in disguise.

Professors McGonagall and Flitwick had just entered the pub with a flurry of snowflakes, shortly followed by Hagrid, who was deep in conversation with a portly man in a lime-green bowler hat and a pinstriped cloak — Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic.

The adults were coming their way, and Hermione – who seemed to think a teacher might recognize when someone _wasn't_ a student they knew – whispered, " _Mobiliarbus_!"

The Christmas tree beside their table rose a few inches off the ground, drifted sideways, and landed with a soft thump right in front of their table, hiding them from view. Staring through the dense lower branches, Adira saw the four adults sit down at the table, and Madam Rosmerta came up with their drinks.

"A small gillywater —"

"Mine," said Professor McGonagall's voice.

"Four pints of mulled mead —"

"Ta, Rosmerta," said Hagrid.

"A cherry syrup and soda with ice and umbrella —"

"Mmm!" said Professor Flitwick, smacking his lips.

"So you'll be the red currant rum, Minister."

"Thank you, Rosmerta, m'dear," said Fudge's voice. "Lovely to see you again, I must say. Have one yourself, won't you? Come and join us. …"

"Well, thank you very much, Minister."

Rosmerta took her drinks tray back to the bar before coming back to sit with the other adults. Adira sipped her butterbeer, trying to ignore the adults, since she didn't want to be an eavesdropper. But their conversation was impossible to ignore, them being so close.

"So, what brings you to this neck of the woods, Minister?" came Madam Rosmerta's voice.

Adira saw the lower part of Fudge's thick body twist in his chair as though he were checking for eavesdroppers. Then he said in a quiet voice, "What else, m'dear, but Sirius Black? I daresay you heard what happened up at the school at Halloween?"

"I did hear a rumor," admitted Madam Rosmerta.

"Did you tell the whole pub, Hagrid?" said Professor McGonagall exasperatedly.

Adira tried to block out the conversation, but as it went on, it got more and more difficult. The conversation flowed around, still centered on Black. She listened as she found out – via Rosmerta's continued disbelief at Black being a murderer – that Sirius Black and James Potter had been best of friends in school, along with someone named Peter Pettigrew.

That was bad enough, but then it came out that during the war, what had led up to his killing 13 people with a single curse had been even worse. That Black had been a spy for Voldemort, then had been made 'secret keeper' for something called a Fideleus Charm, which was supposed to keep the Potters safe. But Black had given the secret to Voldemort, resulting in the deaths of Adira's parents.

Still getting worse, Azkaban didn't affect Black like it did other people, and he'd remained sane. He had even asked Fudge for the bloody crossword puzzle, like he was just bored! And to cap it all off, the man was still – despite all this – somehow Harry's _godfather_.

"But what do you think he's broken out to do?" said Madam Rosmerta. "Good gracious, Minister, he isn't trying to rejoin You-Know-Who, is he?"

"I daresay that is his — er — eventual plan," said Fudge evasively. "But we hope to catch Black long before that. I must say, You-Know-Who alone and friendless is one thing … but give him back his most devoted servant, and I shudder to think how quickly he'll rise again. …"

There was a small chink of glass on wood. Someone had set down their glass.

"Cornelius," Professor McGonagall said, "there's something else I've been meaning to tell you. You know about Potter being several people in one body, yes?"

"Oh yes, I have read a lot of intelligence about them, Minerva. Was there something specific about it you wished to ask?"

"Yes. It's about Alastair Potter. I wanted to know if the dementors are aware that Alastair looks exactly like Sirius Black used to when he was 14. The resemblance is more than uncanny, in fact; it's downright unnerving. I still haven't quite gotten used to it myself. Whenever I have him in my class, I can't decide whether to look away or to stare."

"Oh yes, Minerva, they've been informed. Not that it matters much, though; dementors are blind, you know. They can tell humans apart by sensing their emotions, you know. I'm not sure how that works, not being an expert, but they've assured me they know what someone who's been in Azkaban for 12 years feels like. I doubt there will be any problem there."

"Good," Professor McGonagall replied. "Well you know, Cornelius, if you're dining with the headmaster, we'd better head back up to the castle."

One by one, the adults got up and left the table. Adira sat there, staring at the spot they'd been, her numb appearance belying the growing chaos within.

"Har- Adira?"

Ron and Hermione were staring at her, completely lost for words.

Adira had no clear idea how she'd managed to get back down to the trapdoor in Honeyduke's, along the passage, and into the castle, without accidentally giving away some sign of who she was, and without being stopped by anyone who didn't recognize her. All she knew is time became meaningless as she did so, too absorbed in replaying that conversation in her head, and repressing the growing chaos inside as the others reacted in their own unique ways to the news. It was lucky for all of them that Alastair was the most in shock, or he might have exploded like a nuclear bomb. She had also somehow changed back to a variation on her normal appearance as Harry somewhere along the way.

Ron and Hermione watched Harry nervously all through dinner, not daring to talk about what they'd overheard, because Percy was sitting close by them. When they went upstairs to the crowded common room, ignoring the twins shooting off dungbombs, Harry sneaked back to his dorm room, locked the door, then got into his trunk and dug out the photo album Hagrid had given him at the end of his first year, looking through it feverishly until he finally found it.

He stopped on a picture of his parents' wedding day. There was his father waving up at him, beaming, the untidy black hair Harry had inherited standing up in all directions. There was his mother, alight with happiness, arm in arm with his dad. And there … that must be him. Their best man … Harry had never given him a thought before. It was hard to tell, since Alastair rarely used a mirror when he was Out, and mirrors don't really show you what other people see anyway, but the man _did_ look like an older Alastair.

Mr. Weasley had been right; Azkaban changes people. Even looking for similarities, it was hard to believe that this handsome, happy man so full of laughter was the same man as the prisoner with a sunken, waxy face like he was an unhealthy vampire.

They wondered if he was already working for Voldemort when this picture was taken. Was he already planning the deaths of the two people next to him? Did he realize he was facing twelve years in Azkaban, twelve years that would make him unrecognizable?

 _But the dementors don't affect him,_ Harry thought, staring into the handsome, laughing face. _He doesn't have to hear my mum screaming if they get too close_ —

# _ **Clearly they have some sort of effect on him**_ ,# Iliana told him. # _ **He may still have his sanity, but you saw his face.**_ **#**

 _ **Why? Why do I LOOK like him?**_ Al demanded.

Harry stood up. Things were shifting inside. Al was agitated. This upset Iliana and Zoey in turn. Their shared body shifted at random, the way it did sometimes, hair and eye color changing, hair texture and length changing at random, and so on.

"WHY!?" Al screamed at the room, his surge of rage transforming the body to his appearance, and he saw that face in the mirror, that traitor's face looking back at him.

"WHY!?" he screamed again, his rage causing the mirror to crack.

He began storming around the room, but paused when he heard a knock.

"Harry? Al? Someone?" Ron said through the door. "Can I come in?"

"GO AWAY!" Al roared, continuing to storm around the room.

"No I will not, Al! I'm your friend, and I'm worried about you."

Al stormed over to the door and jerked it open.

"Fine! Come in if you dare."

Ron came in, and Al slammed the door behind him, then went back to storming around the room.

"Um... your mirror's broken."

"OH REALLY? I HADN'T FUCKING NOTICED!"

Ron said nothing to this.

As he stormed around the room some more, Al spoke.

"This explains SOO much! Snape's loathing of me, all the adults acting so weird around me. But it raises so damn many other questions. Like WHY? Why do I look like him? Why do I look like the traitor that got my parents killed? It makes no SENSE!" he screamed, making the mirror crack again with his out-of-control magic.

He grabbed fistfuls of his hair and roared incoherently into the room, which made the furniture shake like it was in an earthquake. On his desk, an ink bottle exploded.

"Mate, calm down before you bring the whole castle down!"

"CALM! CALM? I just found out my dad's best friend betrayed him to Voldemort, and I look just like him, but I'm supposed to be CALM? Would YOU be calm in my place?"

The mirror shattered completely and glass rained to the ground, the wooden frame cracking at the same time.

"Al, seriously, calm down please!"

Someone hammered on the door.

"Mr. Potter," McGonagall said from the other side of the door, "there are reports of objects in people's dorms breaking, and there are tremors in the nearby corridors. Whatever you are upset about, please calm down at once or you will get detention!"

The door slammed open magically, McGonagall jumping back in shock.

"YOU!" Al roared, pointing at her. "YOU KNEW! You knew and you didn't tell us!"

"Knew what, Mr. Potter?"

"I found out what you lying, traitorous adults have been hiding from me all along! I found out that-"

He was cut off mid-sentence, clutching his abdomen in pain and shouting at the agony, doubled over. Before Ron or McGonagall could respond, Alastair glowed bright white and was replaced by a sobbing Zoey. She lifted her head in shock at being there, then ran off into the bathroom and slammed the door locked behind her. When they put their ears to the door, they could hear the young girl crying.

"Well that seems to have sorted itself out for now," McGonagall said.

She went around the room using her wand to repair the things that had broken from Al's rage, then left to do the same elsewhere. Ron hung around for a while, trying to comfort Zoey through the bathroom door, but got no response. Finally, he left.

Zoey woke up the next day in the bathtub, in pain from sleeping in it so uncomfortably, and hobbled out of it and into her room, where she saw the mirror good as new, and an empty ink bottle sitting on the desk. She undressed, used the loo, bathed, and got re-dressed without much enthusiasm, and headed downstairs to an empty common room.

She felt horrible, but was also hungry, so she shambled on to the Great Hall for breakfast, rather surprised that the place was empty but for Ron, Hermione, and a couple teachers.

"Zoey? You look horrible."

"Nnnnnnggh..." was all the sound she could make as she sat down to have some toast and eggs. The toast was like carpet, and the eggs were like rubber.

Ron and Hermione gave each other concerned looks at this.

Zoey perked up a little after getting some food in her, but she still looked horrible.

"Did you fall asleep in the bathroom last night?" Ron asked her.

She nodded. Then she croaked out, "All night. Woke up in the tub. Came straight here."

"What happened to Al?"

Zoey shrugged.

"No idea. He got a pain in his tummy, then vanished. No idea why. But it felt like he was dragged away, almost."

Hermione looked curiously at her.

"That's happened before, hasn't it?"

"Yeah."

"And you don't know who did it?"

"No idea."

"Could there be someone else in there you don't know about?"

"Possible, I guess. Dunno how to find out."

Still in a gloomy mood, Zoey went back to her food, but she was mostly just playing with it now.

"Come on, Zoey, cheer up. Hey you know what? We haven't visited Hagrid in ages, we should go do that."

"But they're not to leave the castle, Ron!"

"They're allowed on the grounds during the daytime," Ron shot back. "What d'ya think, mate?"

Zoey frowned at this, her hair shortening before their eyes, her own eyes changing color back and forth, until suddenly she shot up in height, becoming Alastair.

"Great," he said in a low growl. "We can ask him why he didn't tell us about Sirius Black, and why I look..." he paused, rubbing his temples, his face scrunched up in concentration. "like... this... traitor."

"You okay, mate?"

Al was having a hard time getting up. It looked like he was in a lot of pain.

"No... trouble... at all."

He jerked up out of his seat suddenly, startling both Ron and Hermione. Then, his fists clenched, he started staggering out of the room, looking as though he was fighting against someone pulling him backwards. That's when they noticed his hair shifting color and length at random again. But he kept fighting to go to Hagrid's. In fact, the resistance seemed to be making him angrier and more determined. Ron and Hermione followed him a few feet behind.

Ron turned to Hermione with concern in his face.

"D'ya reckon he's fighting some of the others?"

"Looks like it. I guess they're afraid he'll blow up at Hagrid."

"Probably literally, from what I saw last night. He was breaking things with uncontrolled magic, and shaking the floors."

"Should we try to stop him?"

"And have him accidentally turn us into cats if we're lucky, and blown to kingdom come if we're not? No thank you. I'm staying back here."

Al fought tooth and nail all the way to Hagrid's, even struggling to knock on the door. He was fighting so hard he hadn't noticed he was wearing only his robes, no cloak. The cold wasn't bothering him, but it _was_ bothering Ron and Hermione.

It took some time, and a couple more tries, to get Hagrid to answer the door. And when he did, he was crying. Al was so shocked by this that he lost his anger completely.

"Yeh heard!" Hagrid said, flinging himself onto Al.

"ACK! Don't, man; you're too heavy!"

With Ron and Hermione's help, they all got inside, and got Hagrid sitting down. Once Al was free of his encumbrance, he patted himself down, quite oblivious to the fact that their transformation was stuck as half-Al and half-Harry, pretty much right down the middle.

"Heard what, Hagrid?" said two voices simultaneously, making Al start. He and Harry had spoken at the same time. Hagrid didn't seem to notice.

"Beaky got hurt! Some sort o' hex, don't know what. Madam Pomfrey's been helpin' me, bless 'er, but she's no animal expert. Had ter call fer a magical creatures specialist."

"Malfoy," Al-Harry said. "I'd bet anything it was Malfoy."

"Yeah, that makes sense. He didn't dare tell his daddy on Hagrid, after your threat to him, but he's getting revenge anyway."

They shifted fully back to Harry. Then he said, "Little blond git doesn't listen well, does he? We told him to leave our friends alone. That means our friends' friends, too."

"Is Buckbeak going to be okay, Hagrid?"

Hagrid bawled again. They let him carry on a bit. After a few moments, through the sobs, he said, "Dunno. Like I said, Madam Pomfrey's got ter get in an expert ter help. She doesn't reckon he's gonna die any time soon, but she doesn't know fer sure."

It was then that a whistling sort of coughing noise got their attention. In Hagrid's bed, the huge hippogriff Buckbeak was curled up, shaking, covered in a chaotic mix of pox marks and other hex marks, and coughing wheezily every now and then. Malfoy had apparently hit the hippogriff with several hexes, maybe even a dozen or more.

"Oh Hagrid," Hermione said, hugging the large man.

"Anything you need, Hagrid," Harry said, hugging the man as well, "we'll help with."

"Yeah, me too," said Ron.

"And me," said Hermione.

"Thanks, all of yeh, but I don't really think there's much that yeh _can_ do."

"We can support you."

"And get revenge on Malfoy for you."

"No, don't do that. Yeh'll just upset him more, and he might do summat worse."

"Hmm... you have a good point there. Okay, we won't."

 _ **Not in any way where the little git will suspect us of it, anyway,**_ thought Al.

"Who's the expert she's bringing in? Do you know yet?"

Hagrid sniffled. "Dunno. Bunch of em. Dunno which ones."

"Oh. Well hopefully she brings in someone really good."

Hagrid stood up shakily. "I'll... I'll make yeh some tea. Can't let meself be a bad host."

"There's no need, Hagrid..."

"Course there is, I gotta..." but he'd looked at Buckbeak again – who had passed out with exhaustion – and burst into fresh wailing.

"I'll make the tea, Hagrid," Ron said, getting up as Al and Hermione helped their large friend sit down again.

"Ent been meself lately," Hagrid said, stroking Fang the boarhound. "Was worried Malfoy'd sic his father on me over Buckbeak. And gotta walk past them ruddy dementors every time I want a drink at the Three Broomsticks. 'S like bein' back in Azkaban."

He fell silent, gulping his tea. Harry, Ron, and Hermione watched him breathlessly. They had never heard Hagrid talk about his brief spell in Azkaban before. After a pause, Hermione said timidly, "Is it awful in there, Hagrid?"

"Yeh've no idea," said Hagrid quietly. "Never bin anywhere like it. Thought I was goin' mad. Kep' goin' over horrible stuff in me mind … the day I got expelled from Hogwarts … day me dad died … day I had ter let Norbert go. …"

His eyes filled with tears. Norbert was the baby dragon Hagrid had once won in a game of cards.

"Yeh can' really remember who yeh are after a while. An' yeh can' see the point o' livin' at all. I used ter hope I'd jus' die in me sleep. … When they let me out, it was like bein' born again, ev'rythin' came floodin' back, it was the bes' feelin' in the world. Mind, the dementors weren't keen on lettin' me go."

"But you were innocent!" said Hermione.

Hagrid snorted.

"Think that matters to them? They don' care. Long as they've got a couple o' hundred humans stuck there with 'em, so they can leech all the happiness out of 'em, they don' give a damn who's guilty an' who's not."

 _ **It's no wonder Dumbledore hates the dementors so much. They're dangerous monsters. The Ministry has no business allying themselves with such horrors.**_

Even though the trip to Hagrid's hadn't been fun, it nonetheless had done its intended job of making Al forget about his anger for a while, and with Malfoy targeting Buckbeak, gave him something different to be angry at. But the human mind is a weird thing, capable of multiple emotions for multiple reasons at the same time, and Al was not really over looking like the man who had betrayed his parents.

Back in his room later, Al sat at the desk, several red envelopes in front of him. He was trying to decide if he wanted to go through with sending Howlers to the Weasleys after all. There were lots of pros and cons to each decision, send them or not.

"Send the Howlers," he said aloud, writing on a list at the same time. "Pros: It'll feel good to get my anger out. They need to know how angry I am. They need to know it's not right to lie to me, even if they think it's for my own good.

"Cons: They could just decide my reaction proves their position right. They might think I'll go looking for him, seeking revenge, because adults always think young people are stupid and impulsive. Which I guess is often true, but still offensive. More cons? Mrs. Weasley will probably just get angry back and send her own Howler at me. I don't know Mr. Weasley well enough to know how he'd react to a Howler."

He sat there, re-reading the lists, tapping the quill on the desk as he thought. Then, suddenly, he swept the red envelopes off the desk and pulled up normal envelopes and papers.

"God dammit," he said, starting a rough draft of a much calmer letter, telling the Weasleys that he'd found out what they'd been hiding.

The first few drafts he ended up crumpling up and throwing away. But finally he wrote one he liked:

 _Dear Mr. and Mrs. Weasley,_

 _While I do appreciate all you do for us in terms of food, shelter, and affection, I do not appreciate being lied to. The Dursleys had a long history of lying to me, including lying about how my parents died, claiming they'd died in a car crash. They didn't tell me about Voldemort, that he might still be alive, or that his followers might still be after me. Also, they didn't tell me about magic being real, in fact they denied it constantly. I could have died oblivious to the danger at any point, and the same might have been true recently if we hadn't figured it out. So you can see that I have understandable issues with people lying to me. I know that as adults, you think lying to children for their own good isn't wrong, but it very much IS wrong. I am a person, and it's been my observation that adults tend to forget that children and teenagers are humans with their own thoughts and feelings._

 _Would you have lied to me about Sirius Black being out to kill me if I were an adult? I very much doubt it. Would you have lied to me about Sirius Black betraying my parents, and the fact that I look just like the man who betrayed my parents, if I had been an adult? I doubt it. So why do you think it's alright to lie to me, just because I'm not an adult yet?_

 _I also understand you think I'll be out for revenge against Sirius Black. Do you really think me that stupid and reckless? My parents died to save my life, my mother's sacrifice kept me alive again down in the bowels of the castle in my fight against Quirrell and Voldemort, why would I risk their sacrifices to get revenge on Sirius Black? Quite aside from the fact I'm not that stupid or reckless, I also know I've never killed anyone on purpose before, and I know from books I've read over the years that killing someone isn't easy. Heck, Iliana accidentally killed Quirrell in self-defense, and she still gets upset if she thinks about it for too long. Knowing this, I wouldn't even try, because if I succeeded, we'd be in therapy for decades, and if we failed, we'd be six feet under._

 _Yes, I was indeed very angry when I found out. My anger was so great that my magic got out of control and broke things around the room, and shook the floors and walls. I was very tempted to send you Howlers as promised. But I decided instead to take the high road, hoping you will recognize that in so doing, I am not the impetuous, reckless child you think I am._

 _So in future, please be honest with me. Being honest with children is, in fact, the surest way to ensure that children are honest with you as well. This is true of adults, as well, because both adults and children are human beings. (Though truth be told, children tend to be more honest than adults, if only because they aren't as well practiced in the art of lying.) The only real difference between adults and children is experience. That and the unfortunate tendency of adults to think themselves better than children and teens because of that experience, but that is hardly universal._

 _I apologize for letting some of my anger show in that last paragraph, but it's true, and so I'm not going to rewrite this letter to remove it. Anyway, please consider my words. Please decide to be honest with me in the future. Maybe your own experience with children and teenagers is different, but speaking for myself, I've been through a lot in my life, and as such I am a consummate survivor. Please trust that the survival instincts I've honed over the 10 years I lived with the abusive Dursleys, and the two years since then dodging Voldemort twice, will continue to serve me well. Please trust that these instincts will keep me safe, and that because of them I am actually far less likely to do reckless things than others my age might be._

 _Sincerely,_

 _Alastair Potter and the rest of the Potter collective_

He read it over, and then nodded, satisfied.

# _ **You, not as reckless?**_ **#** Iliana thought. # _ **What a laugh and a half that is, you and Harry running off to Hogsmeade without permission the other day. And don't you think they're going to wonder how you found this out?**_ **#**

 _ **I was against that, if you'll recall! And anyway, if they ask, I'll just say someone at Hogwarts told me.**_

 __ **#** _ **Uh huh. Okay.**_ **#**

 _ **Hush, you.**_

 __ **#** _ **No I will not, Alastair Potter! You are such a hypocrite, telling the Weasleys one thing and being something completely different. Just like how you and Zoey lied to Dumbledore last year when you promised to stop investigating the Heir business.**_ **#**

 _ **Funny, I don't recall hearing you objecting when we did.**_

 __ _Would you both stop it?_ Harry said to them. _You're both insufferable._

# _ **No I will not. He's going to send that letter, telling them off for lying while conveniently forgetting he's lying to them. You want to send the letter, Al, then you tell them you and Harry went to Hogsmeade without permission through that secret tunnel. And while you're at it, tell the teachers about that passageway, because Sirius Black could be getting in that way!**_ **#**

 _ **I don't know who would be a worse headmate, you or Hermione!**_

 __ **#** _ **Wow, if that was meant to offend me, you failed. Hermione has more sense than you do, Alastair Potter!**_ **#**

 __ _PICKLES! DANCING PICKLES IN TUTUS!_ Zoey chimed in randomly.

 _Seriously, it's very aggravating when you lot argue in my head like this!_

 _ **YOUR head? Excuse me, but who proclaimed you the Original, if such a title can even be claimed by any of us? Just because you go by the body's name doesn't make you-**_

 _BABY BELUGA IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA, SWIM SO WILD AND SWIM SO FREE! THE HEAVENS ABOVE AND THE SEA BELOW, SEE THE LITTLE WHITE WHALE ON THE GO!_

 _ **ZOEY! SHUT UP!**_

 __ _OH BABY BELUGA, OH BABY BELUGA, IS THE WATER WARM? IS YOUR MAMA HOME WITH YOU SO HAPPY?_

Al put his hands over his ears futilely, trying to drown out the noise of Zoey singing. He ended up having to just ignore it. Anyway, it had served its purpose; Zoey's singing stopped the arguments, as everyone was reacting to the racket of Zoey's singing, which gave Al the chance to send the letter off with Hedwig. The owl looked a little concerned at his expression, since he was trying to block out the singing and tie the letter on at the same time.

"It's okay, Hedwig. It's just noisy in here," he said, tapping his head. "Anyway, to Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, please."

She hooted at him with understanding, and flew off. 

End note 1: Yes, Harry's pronouns are a little confusing right now. But he's in a transitional period. He'll be using she/her/hers exclusively in time. Also, Adira is pronounced Uh-DEER-uh. It means "strong, noble, powerful."

End note 2: I've actually veered off my own collective's design a little with the Potters. That whole "pain in the abdomen, then person in Front is jerked back In" thing doesn't happen to us. Just to the Potter collective. Also, another difference is that Zoey is kind of a Gatekeeper, and our system doesn't have a Gatekeeper.

End note 3: The Baby Beluga song Zoey sings in this chapter is by Raffi Cavoukian (copyright 1980). It's among the songs our Molly sings sometime. We were initially going to go with "It's a Small World," but Disney has a bad habit of getting ridiculously pissy about such things, so we went with "Baby Beluga" instead. Also, the scene that song appears in is a fairly accurate representation of some of the arguments our own collective has.


	17. The Broom, the Secret, and the Traitor

"The Many Faces of Harry Potter: Chapter 17"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Seventeen: The Broom and the Traitor

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for any bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. It's been frustrating me, too, but some things are just too perfect already to change.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__

Note 4: Okay, so I have some MAJOR canon divergences planned. The farther out we go from here, the more different things will be. Far enough out, and even I don't know what will happen yet!

Note 5: Been getting some reviews/comments from people who are sore that Harry is trans. I have this to say to those people: Don't like Harry being trans? You can bugger off and keep it to yourself. I'm not interested in hearing your hatred.

I'm gonna say this again, because transphobes apparently don't understand English very well: If you don't like Harry being transgender in this or any other fic, then go away and never return. Do not darken my inbox with your unsolicited, unimportant, unintelligent, and hateful opinion. You are right up there with racists in my book, so please kindly sod off. I will block all of those who fail to heed these words.

The inside of their head was surprisingly quiet the next morning, with nobody in the collective talking to one another much. Harry could have used talkativeness, though, because he woke up having found himself in full Adira mode. He didn't remember coming Out, much less like this, and was very glad they had their own room now. Harry switched with Zoey so he could come out again differently. Only, instead of going full boy mode, he came out in a modified version of the form, with hair that was easier to manage and longer, of course, but also... certain changes down below. Luckily, in their robes, there would be no telltale lack of bulge to give him away.

He went to the bathroom and felt giddy at the sensation of peeing with the modified form. Of course, he knew what it felt like from Iliana's and Zoey's transformations, but this was much different. There was a noticeable difference in how things felt when he was Out than when he was watching from the back of his own brain while someone else drove, even if he could see, hear, and feel everything the others did, like whoever was driving the body was a filter, and the sensations the others got were less intense for it.

After that was done, Harry went down to breakfast. Nobody else was there yet, so he opened a book of defensive magic in front of him and read from it as he ate kippers and eggs with his free hand. Then he paused, and thought, realizing he was still thinking of himself with he/him/his pronouns. Harry frowned at this thought, but ignored it for now. He was still presenting as male, so he'd worry about pronouns later, if he ever got the nerve to come out as trans.

A school owl flew in and landed next to him. At first, his stomach dropped like a stone, worried it was a response from Mr. and Mrs. Weasley already, but it turned out to be from Healer Young, about their session today. The last one had been postponed because the Healer had a slight emergency at home with a grandchild, and Harry had completely forgotten that he'd agreed to reschedule it for today. Harry quickly wrote back a reply, and sent it with the owl.

Harry was still reading and eating when Ron and Hermione came down to join him.

"Nose in a book during the holidays? You're almost as bad as Hermione."

"Hey!" Hermione said, hurt.

"No offense, Herm, but holidays are for relaxing."

"But we _do_ have homework."

"Yeah, but that can wait. We have weeks left til term starts again."

"A week and six days," she corrected.

"Which is just a day short of a fortnight," Ron pointed out.

"Ron," Harry said, "there is such a thing as reading for pleasure, you know."

"Reading a defense magic book for pleasure?"

"I was raised by Muggles, remember? A part of me will always be thinking 'I'm living in a fantasy universe, this is so cool!'"

Ron shrugged.

"Whatever, mate. Ah, kippers!"

Harry went back to reading.

After Ron had been stuffing his face for a while, he sat back, belly full, and sighed.

"So Harry, whatcha wanna do after this? We could go outside and have a snowball fight. Or visit Hagrid."

"I have an appointment with Healer Young at 10am, but after lunch we could do that."

"You just gonna read til then, I suppose?" Ron said, sounding a little put out.

"Yeah."

"You look a lot better than Zoey did yesterday, Harry," Hermione said.

"Yeah, well, we got better sleep."

Ron sighed. "Sure you don't want to play some wizard chess instead?"

"That wouldn't last long. Didn't you beat me in 10 minutes the last time we played?"

"Oh, right."

Ron stood up.

"I'm gonna go... I dunno. To the common room? Better bored in there than bored here."

"Sorry, Ron," Harry apologized.

"Nah, it's okay. Maybe I can find Nick and play chess with him."

"Oooh," Hermione said, "if you do, tell us how it goes. I imagine playing chess with someone who's over 500 years old would be fascinating."

Ron shrugged. "Okay, if you say so."

They watched him leave the room, then went back to reading.

Only, Harry couldn't concentrate on his reading. He was thinking. Thinking, and looking at Hermione across from him. His thoughts were complicated, and mostly revolving around his secret, his real gender, and how his two best friends didn't know yet. He didn't know if he would ever come out as Adira to the whole school, but he knew if he was going to do that, he wanted Ron and Hermione to know first. If for no other reason than to see if he'd still have friends after.

Sure, they'd seen him as Adira, but that had been a disguise. He liked the name for himself (herself? Ugh, whatever), but Adira Lily Jamie Potter would look as much like him as possible, unlike Adira Molina. She wanted to be herself, after all.

Harry was still lost in thought when Hermione spoke to him.

"Harry?"

"Huh? Oh... what?"

"It's almost time for your appointment, according to my watch."

"What? Oh, thanks Hermione."

He got up and tucked his book under his left arm.

"See you later."

"You too," she said, barely looking up from her own book.

He found Healer Young by the front entrance, just closing the door against the cold; he had just now gotten there, then.

"Oh hello there," Healer Young said through a thick scarf. "Iliana not here today?"

"No, sir. I'm the one who needs it. Iliana isn't happy about Quirrell dying, there's a scar there and so she doesn't like to think about it, but she's over it. When she does think about it, she just feels a little sad, but no longer worried about being a murderer."

"Alright then. But if she ever needs to talk again, I'll still be here. Though I still do work with St. Mungo's, I am the school Mind Healer now."

Harry nodded.

"So why don't you sit down and tell me what's on your mind?"

Harry noticed, then, that he was still standing, his arms crossed. Healer Young had his winter cloak, scarf, and hat off and was sitting down already. Harry hastily uncrossed his arms and sat down. But he felt uncomfortable, and didn't speak.

Perhaps sensing this, Healer Young used his wand to make a teapot and teacups appear, and made some tea, offering some to Harry, who accepted. The cold was still radiating from the Healer's clothes, chilling the room. He thought as he sipped his tea.

"Okay," said Healer Young, "perhaps an icebreaker? I know a fair amount about Iliana, but so far I haven't really met you, Harry. How was your summer vacation? I hear you went to Egypt with the Weasleys. How was that?"

Harry shrugged, spilling some of his tea.

"It... was pretty cool. I've never been out of the country before. The Dursleys don't travel much, and when they do, they never took me anywhere, except to the zoo that one time, and that was only because they couldn't find someone to mind me, and didn't trust me to stay home alone."

"Did you see any sights?"

"Oh yeah. Saw the pyramids, saw the sphinx. Saw a bunch of wizarding tombs with mutated skeletons in them. It was fun, and cool."

"I understand you were very adamant about being out to see it with your own eyes for about the first half of the trip, then suddenly you withdrew and weren't seen again until school. And even then, not very frequently. Did you see something that frightened you?"

Harry put his cup down and stood up again, pacing around the room with his arms crossed. Healer Young patiently waited.

"Yes and no. Kinda. I saw something I thought I'd seen the last of. Did I ever tell you about the Mirror of Erised?"

"The mirror that Dumbledore hid the Philosopher's Stone in?"

"Yeah, that one. Did I tell you that I saw the Mirror around Christmas that year? It was in an unused classroom."

"No, you didn't. So you saw something in the Mirror then?"

"Yeah. Something I didn't know what to make of. I was me, but I saw Iliana in the Mirror. And I didn't like that, so I started coming out more, thinking it meant I wanted Iliana to replace me."

Harry paced around some more, silent.

"And that wasn't what it meant?"

"No."

"How did you figure that out?"

"I... I saw it again. The Mirror, over the summer. Dumbledore must've sold it or something, and it somehow ended up in Egypt. I saw it in a shop."

"And you saw something in it? Something... different?"

"Yes. I saw... I saw me. Only, I was different. I was... I was a girl. But not Iliana. I was a girl version of me. And older, too. More... well... more _developed,_ if you catch my meaning."

"And that made you hide away?"

"Yeah, well... between that image and Al's comments about it, I finally worked out what the original thing I saw in the Mirror meant. It meant... well, I like being Out, but I also like Iliana's version of the body. The softness, the long flowing hair, the feeling of... certain parts of the body... when we're her or Zoey. I didn't want to be replaced by Iliana, I wanted to be... a girl, like her."

Harry's face turned bright red at this, and he was pointedly looking away from Healer Young.

There was a silence of what felt like many minutes before the Healer spoke again, a thoughtful silence.

"Harry... do you know what the word 'transgender' means?"

Harry nodded.

"Yeah, I do. It means you start out thinking you're a boy, and you realize you're a girl, in your brain or your soul or whatever. Or the other way around, too, I guess. But in my case, I'm... I'm a girl."

And there it was, a sensation like relief, but mixed with excitement and nerves.

"I'm a girl," Harry repeated. "I'm... I'm Adira Lily Jamie Potter. Not Harry James Potter. My parents... they gave me that name thinking I was a boy. But I'm a girl."

More thoughtful silence. Harry could sense, with their empathic sense, that Healer Young was thinking, planning out what to say. But Harry suddenly turned and interrupted.

"How can I be a girl! Is there something wrong with me? What would my parents think of it, if they were alive? What will my friends think? What will my enemies think? What will everyone else think? I'm famous as Harry Potter, are they always going to be calling me that even if I keep insisting I'm Adira Potter? Are there sex change potions? Would they even work on me? Do I even need them? And why this? Why me? I'm already enough of a freak as is, with surviving a killing curse and then this whole... multiplicity thing. And now this. Why?"

He stopped talking. Healer Young waited before speaking.

"Those are all very good questions. We can address them all if you want, but first, I'm curious what you meant by the question 'do I even need them?'"

"Well, I've found I can transform, into a girl version of this form. The... the down below parts even look right. But I have no idea if the inside bits are changing too. Not that it really matters, I guess, since I'm a girl no matter what my body is like, but it would be nice to know how complete the transformation is. Knowing that, I could then move onto whether or not there are sex change potions, and whether or not they'd even work for me, given my unique qualities."

"I see. Well if those are pressing issues for you, we could arrange for Madam Pomfrey to give you a thorough examination in your girl form. I understand that she found Iliana to be fully functional internally. I know she would be very discreet, and lock the door to keep others out during the examination."

"I... yeah, that would be good."

"As to the others... well your friends, Ron and Hermione at least, have certainly stuck with you through all sorts of unusual business, with your multiplicity and with the adventures you keep finding yourselves getting into. I suspect they'll adjust to this, too. The hardest part will be the waiting. Once it's done, you'll know one way or another, and I suspect you'll probably look back at this fear and laugh at yourself for it, even though it is an understandable fear."

"I hope you're right. I think you are; about Hermione, at least. I'm not sure about Ron, but he'll probably be fine, too. Oh, and Luna; Luna will be completely nonplussed, I'm sure."

Healer Young nodded absently.

"As to the others," Healer Young said, "well, there's nothing that says you have to come out to everyone, or right away. You can take as much or as little time as you like with that. With all of it, for that matter."

"No, I can't... I can't keep living this lie. Now that I know the truth, the thought of staying like this, the thought of continuing life as Harry Potter, makes me ill. Ron and Hermione and Luna have to know, at least."

"Well if that's the case, having them know will likely make it easier to come out to others."

"Professor Lupin would probably be cool with it, too," Harry said absently to himself.

The Healer didn't react to this, even though he heard it loud and clear.

"Oh GOD," Harry said, hands in his hair, "I don't know if I can change in front of Madam Pomfrey!"

"Would it help to try it for me, first?"

"I... I'll try, I guess."

Harry took a large breath in, and concentrated. Without any glow at all, their body changed to Iliana's. She blinked, confused for a moment, then disappeared again.

Standing there before Healer Young was a girl Harry's height, hair color, eye color, everything. But her hair was longer, and while it still looked a bit of a mess, it looked a lot better than Harry's usual hair. Harry was Adira now, looking basically the same. Aside from the hair, a pair of slight bulges in the chest region, and a softer quality to the face, she looked the same as she always did.

"Well, this is me," she said.

Her voice sounded slightly more feminine, but was still essentially the same. Of course, being only 13 and a bit of a late bloomer, her voice hadn't had time to deepen yet, so the difference was minimal.

"Aside from your hair and your chest, you look the same as always. And the chest is currently barely noticeable; I only noticed it myself because I was looking for differences."

"Yeah, well..." Adira said, grabbing Healer Young's hat and putting it on her own head, shoving her hair under it. "I don't want to change back right now. Can we go now? To Madam Pomfrey?"

"Okay. Shall I go ahead of you, and explain things to her first?"

"Um... sure."

"If you're not there in 10 minutes, should I come find you?"

"I guess. Yeah."

Ten minutes later, Adira knocked on the door of the Hospital Wing. The door opened, and the matron stood there. When she saw who it was, she let Adira in, and guided Adira over into her office. She closed that door behind them, and cast privacy spells on it before turning to Adira.

"You can take that hat off now, Ms. Potter," the matron said kindly.

Adira did as directed, and handed the hat back to Healer Young. Her hair spilled onto her shoulders. Madam Pomfrey handed her a brush.

"Here, Ms. Potter, you can brush your hair while I run my tests, it'll give you something to take your mind off things."

Adira took the brush with a nod, and brushed her hair. She found, to her surprise, that it did indeed have a meditative effect on her mind, emptying it of thought as the matron did her tests. It also did weird things to time, so she had no idea how long she'd been doing it when the matron got her attention.

"Yes, Madam Pomfrey?"

"I think you'll be pleased to know, Ms. Potter, that the magic you used to transform yourself to match your new perception of yourself has given you everything that you'd have if you'd been born with them to begin with. You've essentially performed sex change magic on yourself, which I suppose makes sense, given what I know of Iliana and Zoey."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. I don't joke about medical matters, Ms. Potter."

"Wow, cool!"

"By the way, Ms. Potter, my tests also revealed that your body's hormones are changing, and I rather suspect you will need some of these soon," she said, handing Adira some pads and pain relieving potions.

"No need to look so embarrassed, girl; it's a fact of life, now that you're one of us. I rather suspect Iliana would've needed them anyway. The pads are magic, by the way. You should only need one a day, no matter how heavy your flow; they'll soak up the blood and other bits magically all day long, without any odor. If you know how to Vanish things, you can Vanish them when they're full, or you can chuck them in the garbage; the bins in Hogwarts automatically Vanish whatever's in them every hour on the hour. Well, except for animals or other living creatures."

"Thanks," Adira muttered, handing the pads back but keeping the potions. "It's just, we have some already from Iliana, remember?"

"Well, you can never have too many of them."

Standing up, Adira switched to Iliana, then back to her Harry form. It made her feel sick to her stomach, going back to being Harry, like the 'Harry Potter' disguise had died and putting it back on was like putting her hand inside a corpse and making it move like it was a puppet. And it was that sick feeling that made her realize where she had to go next, after putting the pads and potions away.

But before going back, 'Harry' asked the matron one last question.

"Are there any potions for preventing periods? I remember from some commercials on the telly that Muggles have things like that."

"Yes, we do, but you are a young and developing girl, and it is my professional opinion that you should wait a few years at least before using those. Even with your unique condition, taking those potions might do strange things to your body during puberty. Not to mention the fact that neither magic nor Muggle pregnancy prevention medicines are safe or effective for everyone. You should research the options, including potential side effects, before using any of those, and you will get them through me or another Healer if you get them at all. But preferably through me, while you are still in school. Those sorts of things can have some very odd side effects on people under normal circumstances. And given your unique situation, I'm not sure I would recommend them even after puberty is done with you. Especially if Zoey remains a child for the rest of your life."

"Um... okay," Adira said, uncertain and uncomfortable with all this sudden puberty and sex talk.

"Well, that should be all, unless you had any other questions?"

"Er, no."

"If you think of any more, Ms. Potter, you're always welcome to come ask me. And if it would make things easier, you could have Iliana ask for you."

"Got it. Thanks, Madam Pomfrey."

As she walked back to the common room, her stomach churned in knots, thinking about telling Ron and Hermione. Who should she tell first? Or should she tell them both at the same time? How did you bring up something like this? She tried imagining going up to them and saying, 'Hi, wanna go outside and throw snowballs? By the way, I'm actually a girl and you should call me Adira now. I'm gonna go grab my cloak.' Somehow, that didn't seem to be a good idea. Hermione would probably blink in confusion, needing it repeated as she would've probably been engrossed in a book, and Ron would either goggle and splutter at her, or think it was a joke.

She imagined just walking in as Adira. They would immediately know who it was, still, since the only really noticeable difference so far was long hair that was somewhat tamed for her. It might not be enough, though, for them to notice the gender change. They might just ask why her hair was longer. Would she have to put something colorful in her hair, and paint her nails? Transfigure her robes into a dress?

This line of thinking annoyed her, because she shouldn't need to change anything at all. Though she was 13, her long history of being underfed had made puberty come later than normal, if it had even began to come at all, and she still had the androgynous appearance of most pre-pubescent children. She supposed she wouldn't know until/unless she got a period, which she wasn't even sure would happen, despite what Madam Pomfrey said. Maybe her body was just mimicking the right parts, and wouldn't work right?

Not that they needed to, of course; there were plenty of girls who never got periods, or got them but were sterile. And anyway, what defined a girl, anyway? There were girls that looked and acted like boys. And back to presentation, everyone in Hogwarts wore the same uniform of black robes and hat. Everyone dressed identically, except for those who chose to wear a pin or a scarf or other decoration to show which House they were in, and some of the girls wore things in their hair or, indeed, painted their nails.

And even if it did work, there was still the worry about her friends' reactions. Granted, on some level she wasn't _really_ worried, since they'd all been in life and death situations before, and they adjusted quite well to Adira's multiplicity well enough. She was being silly, but she couldn't help it.

She paused at Sir Cadogan's portrait, staring at the knight, who was napping. She was considering asking him, quietly, for his opinion on the matter. His pony looked at her, then nudged Sir Cadogan awake. He awoke with a start and tried to stand, putting up his fists, but his visor fell over his eyes and he tripped and fell to his metal knees.

"Fight! Stand and fight, you yellow-bellied coward, sneaking up on me and blinding me in a vulnerable moment! I shall have you drawn and quartered, then bury you in four different cemeteries for this insult!"

"Your visor just fell down is all," Harry/Adira said.

The knight stopped moving for a moment, then lifted his visor and looked at them.

"I see. In more ways than one. So, young scallywag, what pray tell is the password? Tell me or I shall skewer you upon my sword!"

"'Scurvy cur,'" Adira said, all desire to talk with the knight having evaporated.

"Well played, lad, well played. You have bested me for now, but one day we shall tussle forsooth," Cadogan said, swinging open for her. She glared at him as she went inside.

She soon found Ron and Hermione, and before long they were bundled up and heading outside to play in the snow. But the whole time, she was distracted by thoughts of telling them her secret, and trying to work out how they would react. She got hit a lot more than anyone else, as a result, and was thoroughly soaked by the time they went back inside.

At dinner, she remained distant and thoughtful. Hermione kept glancing up at her, but said nothing. Ron was oblivious, rambling on about the Chudley Cannons whenever he wasn't eating (and even when he _was_ eating, which grossed out both 'Harry' and Hermione).

When they headed back after dinner, Hermione hung back with Harry and walked silently alongside, looking frequently like she was thinking of asking questions.

"Well, I'm exhausted," 'Harry' said. "I'm going to go turn in early."

Ron's face fell a little, but then he said, "Yeah, we did have a long day of play. I guess I'll turn in, too, maybe read a Quidditch book."

"See you tomorrow, Ron."

"You too, Harry."

Harry/Adira closed the door behind her and transformed into her fully girl form in the usual way. Then she took out one of Iliana's Muggle dresses and changed into it, admiring herself in the mirror.

There was a knock at the door. In a panic, she shouted "In a moment! I'm not decent!"

In too much of a hurry to transform, she threw a pair of robes over the dress and shoved her hair under her hat, before opening the door. Standing there was Hermione.

"May I come in?"

"Um... okay. I don't think you've seen my new room yet, have you?"

Hermione came in and Harry closed the door behind her.

"Why are you still wearing your hat? The robes I can understand, but the hat?"

"Oh, uh... I... well... it's polite?" Harry/Adira answered lamely.

Hermione looked like she didn't believe it. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then lunged forward and yanked the hat off Adira's head, making the long hair spill out.

"Experimenting with your hair?" Hermione asked.

Adira opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out except for random sounds.

"Sorry if I wrong-footed you," Hermione said. "I just was wondering what's wrong with you today?"

Adira felt embarrassed and angry and a lot of other emotions all at once. Embarrassed at her hair being exposed, embarrassed that it wasn't enough for logical, puzzle-solving Hermione to figure it out, apparently, and angry both that it was done and that it didn't work. She was such a mess of emotions, she didn't know what to say or do. She couldn't even tell her own emotions apart from Hermione's, at that moment.

Opening her mouth to speak, Adira found she couldn't. First, she didn't know what to say. Second, who knew what she'd say if she was somehow capable of speech; for all she knew, random words or something barely resembling language might come out. Or she might scream and shout at her friend, which she didn't want to do.

And then, like something in her mind had set the Wheel of Emotions to spinning and it had finally landed on something, she broke down crying instead. This startled Hermione, who locked the door, because she didn't think it would help anything if Ron came barging in.

That done, Hermione sat next to her friend on the floor and held them in her arms. She said nothing, just made sure her friend knew she was there for comfort if needed. Adira took advantage of this, crying into Hermione's robes, which was uncomfortable for both of them because of her glasses.

And as this happened, Hermione – logical, puzzle-solving Hermione – began to put the pieces together. She began to notice small things first, like how 'Harry' was sitting, the feel of something under the robes that felt like a dress and a bra strap, and then the feminine touches about the room, many of which were difficult to describe. Sure, those could be attributed to Iliana or Zoey, but she knew both of those girls well enough to tell by now that many of these weren't their style, exactly.

Add that to the long hair, the weird distracted silence all day long, the fact that Harry had vanished for so long, what Ron had told her about Harry disappearing that once before daring to go to the boy's dorm, Al's weird speech that one time in Care of Magical Creatures, and little odd things she'd noticed over the past year or so, and she put together a possible answer. Still, she didn't want to presume.

When 'Harry' stopped crying, Hermione decided to speak at last.

"You... you don't have to answer if you don't want, but... are you... I think the term is 'transgender'? Harry, have you discovered... are you really a girl?"

Unable to speak, and looking dejected, Adira nodded.

"I see. And I barged up here like an idiot, you panicked, didn't have time to change back in your panic, and then I stupidly uncovered your hair. Sorry about that."

Adira sniffed. "It's okay. I was thinking about how to tell you and Ron, actually. Wondering how to do it, who to tell first, or if I should tell you both at the same time. I guess the kneazle's out of the bag now, at least with you."

"Um... do you... do you have a new name for yourself yet?"

Adira smiled wanly. "If you think back, I think you can guess."

"If I think back?" Hermione said, pondering. "Oh! You mean 'Adira'?"

"Yeah. Except this time, it's Adira Lily Jamie Potter."

"It's a lovely name, Ha—Adira."

Adira sat up, wiping her face.

"Now I just have to work out how and when to tell Ron."

"Oh god, yes. Ron... bit of a wild card, Ron. Adira, no matter how he reacts at first, remember, he's your best friend. He adjusted to this multiplicity thing, he'll adjust to this new thing."

"I hope so. I mean, it's a bit different, isn't it? The multiplicity thing came out in, what, the first week of school ever? And it's been about two and a half years since then. It's one thing finding out you're friends with like, half a dozen people in the same body. It's something completely different to find out that one of those people who you thought was a boy, was actually a girl."

"Still, Ron's friends with me and Iliana and Zoey," Hermione pointed out.

"Yeah, but now the only boys in the collective are Al and Tier."

"I do see your point. But Ron won't mind. He may get weird about it, who knows, but he'll get over it. He always does. Put it this way, if people thinking you were the Heir of Slytherin didn't push him away, I doubt this will."

Adira snorted. "There are some people who feel weird about us already. I don't know what to make of the feelings I get from them, but some of their behavior tells me enough. But with the exception of the Slytherins, most people seem to not want to say anything about it. But I know they think I'm a freak."

"I doubt-"

"Trust me, I'm right. They do. And they're probably not wrong. I've tried not thinking about it, tried just letting all the weirdness roll over me like water off a duck's back, but then the Dursleys' words come back to me, and I wonder if they're right, but for the wrong reasons."

"Adira, you should bring that up with Healer Young. It's not healthy to keep those feelings bottled up."

She stood up suddenly, and started pacing around the room.

"I hate this waiting, this simmering in worry," Adira said, changing the subject. "I was so scared and worried about telling you, and now it's done, I feel much better. I think... I think I should tell Ron now, get it over with. Whatever happens, I'll feel better not having to worry any longer."

"Do you want me to go bring Ron here?"

"Yes, please, before I change my mind."

Hermione smiled reassuringly.

"Okay, be back soon."

Adira sat down on the floor, her knees in her hands, rocking back and forth as Hermione left. She felt like crying again, the worry hurt so much. It was like an acid eating away at her insides, the worry.

"Harry? Hermione said you wanted me to..." Ron trailed off, entering the room. Hermione came in behind him and closed the door, locking it again just in case.

"Oh, you can change your hair? Neat. Trying to make it look like Al's, are you? If so, it needs a bit of work, mate. Looks more like Hermione's hair, only black."

Something in Adira's body language got through Ron's obliviousness then, making him look concerned.

"What's the matter, Harry? You're not still thinking about that Sirius Black bloke, are you?"

"That's... that's not it, Ron."

Ron sat down on the floor next to Adira.

"So what is it, then?"

Adira could only grimace horribly, tears in her eyes.

"Do you want me to tell him for you?"

Adira shook her head.

"Tell me what? Are you ill? You look ill. Maybe you should see Madam Pomfrey."

 _Well, this is like trying to convince a rock to float,_ Adira thought at the others in her head.

 _ **Ron's not stupid,**_ Al said to him. _**J**_ _ **ust a little slower than Hermione. But then, Hermione is usually faster than most people. Spell it out for him. Piece by bloody piece if you have to.**_

 __ _Bloody Hell, but you're right._

"You... you know over the summer, when I disappeared Inside for a long time?"

"Can't imagine I'll soon forget that, mate. I was worried about you. We all were, in fact; Mum and Dad and everyone."

"And you know back in first year, I ran into the Mirror of Erised?"

"Yeah...?" Ron said, clearly at a loss to the relevance of it.

"And how I saw Iliana instead of me?"

"Oh yeah, that was weird. Did you finally figure that out, then?"

"Yeah. But only because I ran into the Mirror again over the summer."

Ron's eyes went wide.

"You did? You didn't say anything, mate. Bloody Hell, where was it?"

"It was in Egypt, somehow. In one of the shops."

"So what'd it show you that time?"

"It showed me myself... but different. Older. And... well..."

Adira stood up suddenly, and tore off her robes, standing there before the both of them in a muggle girl's dress, a tasteful blue dress with plain black lining.

Ron goggled at her, clearly still confused. Then something clunked into place.

"Oh."

"'Oh'? That's all you can say?" Adira said hysterically, her hands in her hair.

"Blimey, gimme a moment, alright? I..." Ron's face went blank in a thoughtful sort of way. It was like watching all the gears and cogs in his head turning, like his skull was transparent.

"Oh," Ron said again. " _ **OH.**_ Blimey, is this what Al was on about that day in Hagrid's class? You're... you're a _girl_?"

Adira sighed a sigh of mixed exasperation and relief.

"Yes, it is."

"Oh."

"You keep saying that."

"Well excuse me if my brain isn't quite up to snuff, alright?"

"It's okay, I'm just... I thought the worry would go away when I told you, but your responses are ambiguous enough to keep the worry alive."

"Wait, are you worried I'd stop being your friend because of this?"

"Er... yeah. Kinda. I mean, wouldn't you worry in my place?"

Ron blinked, as though he'd never considered that possibility before, but then recovered. "I dunno how to answer that, mate, so I'll answer the one before: you're my friend, no matter who else is in there with you, no matter whether you're a boy or girl, no matter what your name is. By the way, 'Harry' isn't exactly a girl's name, mate. Maybe you should change it."

Adira laughed, tears of happiness in her eyes, and hugged Ron.

"What'd I say?"

"She's _happy_ , Ron. You know, tears of joy."

"Oh, right. That."

Adira tried gesturing to Hermione to tell Ron her new name for her. It took a few tries, but Hermione got the idea.

"She's already picked out a new name, Ron. Adira Lily Jamie Potter."

Ron nodded approvingly.

"Nice name, got a good ring to it."

The next hour or so they spent talking about this and that. Ron was having problems remembering to use the new name and pronouns, but he was trying. Adira was very happy about this, especially when the topic of coming out to other students came up.

"I'm with Al. Anyone who makes fun of you for this is gonna get hexed. Except Malfoy; I'd rather punch him in the nose."

"What about the twins?"

"Oh, them? They've always liked you, and now I think of it, they've said some things to me before that make me think they might already suspect. Knowing them, even if it's a total surprise to them, they'll be your biggest supporters."

"Sounds like what I was thinking, too," Adira said.

She sighed, and leaned back against the bed, relaxed like she hadn't been in months.

"Oh boy, if you'd told me this morning I'd be coming out about this to both of you by bedtime, I'd have thought you were mad. Especially after Madam Pomfrey kept going on about puberty and periods and stuff."

Ron's face took on a distant expression, like he was ignoring the period talk, but he said nothing.

"If you need any, um, supplies, Adira," Hermione said, "I've got some."

"Yours started already?"

"Er, yes," she whispered to Adira, blushing. "Mine started early in second year."

Ron's distant expression took on a different look, then, for a few minutes before he spoke suddenly, startling them.

"I wonder if Professor Lupin was born a girl?" Ron said. The two girls stared at him in shock.

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, he's ill once a month for several days, but he wasn't in the hospital wing when I was cleaning the bedpans for that detention with Snape. I know Mum gets really awful cramps from her monthlies, sometimes so bad she has to spend all day in bed, trying to use her wand to cook from the living room. If Lupin's got something similar... I mean, I know he looks like a bloke, but he could be like Adira, only in reverse, and maybe he's allergic to the sex-change potions?"

Adira and Hermione gave one another a look. Then Adira made an executive decision.

"Um, that's very clever, Ron, and well thought out. But, er... it's also wrong."

"Oh? What else could it be?"

"He's... well... actually, now I think about it, maybe I shouldn't say."

"What else could possibly be making him sick once a month every..." his eyes grew big. "Every month. At the full moon?"

Hermione and Adira nodded.

"He's a werewolf?"

"Um... yeah. I asked him about it, he confirmed it."

"Oh, he did?" asked Hermione, interestedly.

"Yeah, when he showed me the grindylows."

"Wait, how'd you two work it out?"

"Well, between Snape's lesson on werewolves that one time, and recognizing that Lupin's boggart was the moon..." Adira said, trailing off.

"Oh, so you spotted that, too?" Hermione said, pride in her voice.

"Well, Al did."

"A werewolf? Blimey. I wonder if the teachers know?"

"Snape clearly knew. What's more, Lupin told me he's been a werewolf since he was a kid, so clearly Dumbledore knew back then, too."

"Oh!" Hermione said, thinking. "That night Sirius Black attacked the Fat Lady, Dumbledore and Snape were talking, and it sounded like Snape didn't trust someone on staff, and Dumbledore said they'd already discussed that and he trusted everyone on staff. What if they were talking about Lupin?"

"Makes sense," Adira said.

"Well, if Dumbledore trusts him, then I do too."

"Al trusts him, too," Adira said. "Which I think is more reliable than Dumbledore's trust. Dumbledore is a trusting man."

Ron yawned just then.

"Oh my," Hermione said, looking at the time. "It's late. We should be getting to bed."

"Sounds good," Ron said, hugging Adira. "Glad you told me, mate. If you have any problems, let me know."

"I will."

Her two friends left the room, and she locked the door behind them, undressed, and took a nice long soak in the tub before going to bed.

The next few days until Christmas were relatively uneventful; very few people had stayed behind at Hogwart's over Xmas; in Griffindor, it was just Adira, Ron, and Hermione. Ron was playing chess against Adira while Hermione watched. Adira wasn't winning, but she wasn't losing, either. Of course, she was getting help from the others in her brain with her.

"This isn't fair, I should've beat you by now! I'm playing about half a dozen people at once, of course; I'd call that cheating, but you're only just barely holding your own. I guess that's kinda flattering, if annoying," Ron moaned.

Adira smiled. With nobody else in the Griffindor common room but her and her friends, she was in her full girl form, and wearing a dress.

For all Ron's nonchalance, though, Adira had noticed over the past few days that Ron was acting strangely around her, and feeling a strange mix of emotions that confused her, meaning she was having to try to guess from his actions what they meant. So far, she'd noted that he kept getting confused about her name and pronouns, still. He didn't sit as close anymore, and would scoot away when she sat too close to him. Not by a lot, but it didn't have to be. He was uncomfortable with the trans thing, had to be; he'd never acted like that before, with any of them.

Hermione got up then to use the loo. Ron's eyes followed her, and when he saw her disappear, he looked at Adira with an odd look on his face, then looked away.

"So, er... I just wondered... erm... I dunno... I..."

Something about the feelings coming from him made something click in her mind.

"You want to talk about the trans thing, right?"

"The what now?"

"Just... ask what you want, I'll answer. Don't worry about being rude, mate."

"Ah, okay... well, er... so... do you still have, you know...? Or not?"

She sighed slightly.

"No. I worked out how to change fully. I'm 100% a girl, biologically, according to Madam Pomfrey."

"Oh, okay," he said, his face and ears turning red. "And, er... do you fancy guys now?"

"Actually, I fancy guys _and_ girls. Have for quite some time, too. It's called being bisexual."

"Oh."

"But not you. Not that... just... you're my best friend. I think of you like the brother I never had. And like Hermione as the sister I never had."

"Ah," he said, visibly relieved. "Not that I'd mind if you did fancy me, no matter the... well, just, it would've been awkward, I guess, cuz I think of you pretty much the same way. Not like a brother, because I've got too many of those as it is, but kinda like that. Or, well, a sister, I guess."

Ron's face screwed up in thought just then.

"Something else on your mind?"

"Yeah. You're... are you gonna tell everyone else? And when? And do I use your old name and pronouns around people who don't know yet?"

"Excellent question. I was thinking of telling the twins, then Luna, then maybe Ginny. Then from there, I don't know. I do want to come out to the whole school eventually, and sooner rather than later. But it's daunting to think about it."

"Hmm... Ginny, eh? Mate, I don't think she's gonna take this news very well. She fancies you, you know."

"So I've heard."

"But-"

"Yeah, I know, your other question. Yeah, still use my old name and pronouns around everyone who doesn't know. I know that's kinda confusing, but it's important."

Ron nodded.

"Thought so. Good to have it confirmed."

Christmas arrived, and Adira woke to find a pile of presents at the foot of her bed. No sooner had she woken up, but there was a knock on the door.

"Har—Adira? It's me, Ron."

"Just a few moments, I only just now woke up."

She got up, pulled off her nightgown, transformed into her Harry form, and put on school robes.

"Come in."

Ron came in bearing his own gifts.

"Wanted to open mine with you. It's, I dunno, like opening them around family."

Adira smiled.

"Oh, you're... are you?" Ron asked, squinting.

"Yeah, I'm 'Harry' today. Mainly because of the Christmas dinner. Didn't want to transform later, thought I'd get it over with."

"Makes sense."

The two of them opened their presents. Adira/Harry had gotten the usual Weasley jumper, food, and a letter:

 _Dear Alastair and company,_

 _I do understand your anger, dearie, but not knowing any of you as well as you or your friends do, going only on what I've heard of you from my children and other sources, hopefully you'll understand I got the impression that you can be rather impulsive and possibly reckless. Perhaps that's only when there are lives at risk, I don't know, but even then, knowing what Black has done, you might consider dealing with him to be in the best interest of saving lives. I'm sorry if these assumptions were wrong. I do hope you'll understand I was only looking to keep you safe. Especially since, as I understand it, living with those horrible Muggles gave you some sort of magical protection that is gone now._

 _I am glad to hear you're taking the sensible path and staying safe. So is Arthur. But enough of this serious business for now. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas. Hopefully that madman will be brought to justice soon, so you can come 'round for Easter holidays._

 _Merry Christmas!_

 _With love from Molly Weasley_

A tension they hadn't been aware of holding in released then, and Adira smiled. Then she remembered that she'd have to tell Mrs. Weasley about being transgender, too. But she put that out of her mind for then. She'd write Mrs. Weasley a letter soon. Until then, she was determined to enjoy Christmas.

She turned back to opening her presents, which were mostly the usual sort of stuff. But then she found a long package that got even Ron's attention. She was fairly sure she had some idea what it was, and thought at first that it was from McGonagall, since they'd gotten their first broom from her in first year. But there was no note on it at all. And when she unrolled it, the broom that came out of it was...

"A FIREBOLT! Holy COW!" Ron shouted.

"Don't touch it!" Adira said, leaping back from it.

"Why not?"

"There's no name on it. And I don't know anyone who would or could spend this much on me."

"So?"

"So, there's a mad lunatic after my blood. Well, _another_ mad lunatic after my blood, and this one has a body."

"You mean Black? But he's an escaped fugitive! He can't just walk into either Gringotts _or_ Quality Quidditch Supplies when he's on the lam! And anyway, he hasn't got a wand!"

"There are ways. He could use Polyjuice Potion. It might be difficult to get ahold of the ingredients, but he could pick a few pockets to get enough cash to buy what he needs for that. Knockturn Alley merchants probably won't ask questions. Then it would be a cinch going into Gringott's and anywhere else he needs to get a wand, or this."

"Yeah, but the moment he tried to use his vault key, they'd know who it was! And far as I know, there aren't any free members of house Black who he could impersonate to get it."

"I dunno. I never got the impression the goblins cared much about human affairs."

"But if they saw him, and recognized him, but didn't tell anyone, they'd be in trouble with the law! And they'd want to avoid that. They wouldn't like Azkaban any better than wizards would."

"Maybe. But magic can do a whole lot. If nothing else, he could steal a wand and use it to force someone to give him this broom, and then he could hex it."

Ron looked thoughtful at this. "Huh. Hadn't thought of that. Well, you want me to go get McGonagall for you, then?"

"I think you should."

Ron stood up, abandoning his own presents for now, and walked to the door.

Adira waited, regarding the fancy broom with suspicion. She hadn't wanted to ask the price of the thing when she'd seen it in the store, but she figured it probably cost more than all the brooms she'd got for the school combined, as it was a high-end racing broom.

Hermione came in just then.

"H—Adira, where's Ron going? He wouldn't say more than that he was in a hurry. Wait, what's that?" She pointed at the broom.

"That is the reason Ron's gone to fetch McGonagall. There was no note. It could've come from Sirius Black. It's probably hexed."

Hermione nodded with approval at Adira's sensibility.

"Good idea. Can't be too careful."

A few minutes later, McGonagall came in and examined the offending broom, then confiscated it to have it checked for hexes.

"If it is indeed from Black, Potter, then the joke will be on him. Between myself, Professor Flitwick, and Professor Dumbledore, we can remove any hex that may be on it without damaging the flying charm and the other charms that came with the broom."

Adira smiled at this. It would indeed be funny if that happened, but she didn't really need a new broom, since there were extra 2001's belonging to the school that Iliana could use. However, it would be nice to have her own broom again. But if worst came to worst, she could always buy herself a new one.

Later in the day was Christmas dinner. There were only a few other students there, two nervous first-years and a Slytherin fifth year. Lupin wasn't there, which didn't surprise the Trio, it being that time of the month for the werewolf.

Nothing very interesting happened at the meal, aside from Trelawney making more dire predictions about the Potters dying. Al didn't even bother to comment this time, especially since McGonagall did it for him. But aside from that, and Snape getting a stuffed vulture hat from one of his wizard crackers – something that did not amuse them any more than it did Snape – nothing else really happened.

Which is pretty much how the rest of the holidays went, the Trio hanging around together and enjoying a nice Christmas. The only oddity happened while Adira was struggling to get to sleep one night; she had the Marauder's Map out, and saw the name Peter Pettigrew on it, in Ron's room. Carefully, she tiptoed into Ron's dorm room and looked around. But if Pettigrew had come back as a ghost, he wasn't in the room. Adira made a mental note to ask the Twins about it when they came back.

"Ah yes, Peter Pettigrew," Fred said when Harry mentioned it to them in a spare classroom the day of their return. "The invisible man who sleeps with our brothers."

"Pardon?" Harry asked. (He hadn't yet come out to them as Adira.)

"Oh yeah," said George. "We noticed it our first night with the Map, that Peter Pettigrew, because he was sleeping in the same bed as Percy. But we looked, and he was alone."

"I felt around the bed, but nobody invisible was there either."

"Then some years later, he started sleeping with Ron. Weird that, but again, no sign of anyone else in the bed. Probably just a glitch in the map."

But the collective didn't think so. Harry sat there, thinking.

"I don't know, something about that feels familiar somehow. Like it should mean something. Tell me, does everyone stay in the same dorm room for their whole Hogwarts career?"

"Mostly, yeah. There's the occasional exception, as you know, though."

"So this Peter fellow on the map switched rooms?"

"Yeah, come to that, he did. And now you mention it, we've seen him other places on the Map, too."

"Where? Is there any pattern to it?"

"Hmm... now you mention it, he followed Percy around a lot for a while. Wasn't always with Percy, sometimes stayed in his room or wandered off."

"Then when it switched to Ron, it did the same thing, mostly. You know, hanging around Ron a lot."

They looked at the Map. Ron and Peter Pettigrew were labeled as being in the Great Hall. There was a tiny ink Ron if you looked hard enough, but just a name for Pettigrew.

"Isn't Peter Pettigrew the wizard bloke who snuffed it when Black blew up that street?" Fred asked.

"Yeah. That's why I found his name being there to be odd."

"Well like I say, could be a ghost."

"But if it was a ghost, even an invisible one, wouldn't people – like Percy and Ron – feel a cold spot? They'd know if there was a ghost in their bed, they'd be able to feel it."

Fred and George looked at one another, dismayed and impressed; apparently, the thought had never occurred to them before.

"Blimey, you're right."

"Still, it doesn't matter. Just a glitch, we reckon."

Just then, something clicked in Harry's mind.

"Wait a minute... how long ago did Percy get Scabbers?"

"Oh, what was it, 12 years ago, Fred?"

"Right."

"Where did your parents buy him?"

"Didn't. He just turned up in our garden one day. Percy took a fancy to him and kept him, then outgrew him and gave him to Ron."

"A random, literal garden-variety rat just turned up on your property and your mum let Percy keep him?"

They looked at one another again, a sudden darkness clouding their mood.

"You know, that does sound weird when you put it that way," said Fred.

"Yeah. But he must be magical, or he wouldn't still be alive after all this time."

"Has he ever showed any sign of powers?"

"Not to my knowledge. Doesn't do tricks or anything. Just eats and sleeps all day. Always has."

"Right. And, er... isn't Scabbers missing a toe on one of his forepaws?"

"So?"

"All they found of Pettigrew was a finger," Harry said.

Harry could feel their mood turn to a cold iron lump in their abdomens.

"Blimey, you don't think he's _alive_? That this bloke," Fred said.

"-faked his own death? That he's," George said.

"An _animagus_?" the twins said in stereo.

"That's what I'm starting to think. I mean yeah, I can see where you'd think it was a glitch, but the timing is just too weird. He just shows up out of the blue 12 years ago, then... hmm... when did the name move from Percy to Ron?"

"Bloody hell! It was around the time Scabbers went from Percy to Ron. It happened over the summer, of course. But end of one year, Pettigrew was hanging around Percy. Beginning of the next school year, it had switched to Ron."

"That settles it. Pettigrew is alive. Faked his own death, too, by the look of it. And he's an animagus."

"Well, he must be unregistered, then, because the whole thing was weird enough. All they found was a finger, and they didn't go looking for more? Granted, the rest might've gone down the sewer during the explosion, but still odd. If he was registered as an animagus, they would've known something was fishy. At least I hope the Ministry would have enough sense to find that fishy."

"Why would he fake his own death?"

"Well, if Black was raring for his blood, why not?"

"But there's no way he could've timed things perfectly to coincide with Black's curse, he'd have to have superhuman reflexes or something."

"Wait, do you reckon that means he was the one that killed all those Muggles?"

"Absurd! Black was laughing maniacally after that! He was still laughing when they caught him."

"Maybe the laughter was hysterical, rather than maniacal? If I'd been trying to kill someone, and they beat me to it, or seemed to, then I might go a little unhinged myself," said Harry.

"Why would Black be going after Pettigrew anyway? I mean, even a Death Eater has to have some kind of reason for something like that." George said. "And that was one part of the story that never made sense to me."

"The Minister said, when I accidentally overheard him talking about it at Hogsmeade, he said Pettigrew had said he was going to tell on Black about betraying my parents. But it sounded like Black was already there when he said that? So that doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless Black predicted that."

Harry then spent some time filling the twins in on what he'd overheard.

"So why hide out all this time as a rat?" Fred asked when Harry was done. "Black was in Azkaban! Even if he hadn't killed Pettigrew, he still killed a bunch of Muggles, too. And seriously breached the Statute of Secrecy to boot. So why not come forward? Especially after the witnesses told the Ministry that Black had been the secret-keeper. It doesn't make any sense! He'd be lauded as a hero for exposing the truth!"

"I still can't believe he timed his transformation so perfectly. And how'd he lose the finger? He had to have been the one who blasted the street apart, not Black. And cut his finger off so there'd be something for them to find. Still odd that they stopped looking for the rest of him."

"That answers one question and raises more. Like, why? Why do that? Especially if Black was gonna do it himself anyway?"

"What do we know about the Fideleus Charm?"

"Us? We know what you know, mate." George said.

"But," said Fred, "and this is just a wild stab in the dark, but, well... it sounds like a very advanced charm. Probably not many who could perform it, or everyone would've been using it back then. And you have to really trust the secret-keeper. Which might not be the same person who cast the charm. I don't know how it works, of course, but I know if I were designing something like that, I'd want to be able to set the secret-keeper without anyone but me knowing who it is."

"Yeah," said George. "So the most anyone else would know is who they'd been planning to use, not who they actually went with. I mean, the only ones who knew would be the secret-keeper and the people being hidden, ideally. Anyone else would only know whatever the others told them."

"I imagine the Ministry would've used veritaserum – truth potion – on Black when they brought him in."

"Yeah, but back then things were a right mess. Dad said a lot of people never even got trials."

"Wait," said Harry. "Some people never even got a trial?"

"According to Dad, yeah. And he would know; he works at the Ministry. And he was working there when all this went down."

"If they can overlook a trial, why couldn't they also overlook using veritaserum? Big spectacle like that, Black's laughter, and looks like they assumed Pettigrew's body was obliterated... seems pretty open and shut, especially if you're still besieged by the tail end of a war. What if Black wasn't given a trial _or_ truth potion? What if they just chucked him in prison and forgot about him?"

"Could happen," Fred said. "It was war. And You-Know-Who disappearing didn't help much at first. Most people didn't trust he was dead, since there was no body. Death Eaters – his followers – were running around still causing chaos before things finally started to settle down. It's possible."

"Right travesty of justice if so, but possible," agreed George.

There was silence for several minutes. Then...

"He wasn't the secret-keeper," Harry said.

"What's that?"

"You said it yourself, the only people who would know for sure who the secret-keeper was would be the casters – like my parents – and the secret-keeper. But someone who was being considered for the position might be able to guess. What if Pettigrew was the _real_ secret-keeper, and Black was a decoy? It would explain Black's actions, why Pettigrew faked his death, why he's been in hiding. After all, someone might finally realize they never questioned Black, and find out the truth from him."

"Right. And you said the teachers, in that conversation you overheard, said Black and your dad were very talented, and that Peter wasn't. So a decoy would make sense." George began.

"Yeah," said Fred. "They knew there was a spy. What if they wanted You-Know-Who to think Black was the secret-keeper, but really it was this weak, talentless Pettigrew?"

"That would mean Pettigrew was the secret-keeper," Harry said. "Which means Black didn't betray my parents, _he_ did!"

"And he might've been the spy, too, we reckon."

He stared at the name on the Map, with anger in his eyes. But this was a cold, calculating anger.

"We have to catch him. And, I dunno, force him back to human shape somehow. We need proof. After all, even I'm not sure we're not just stabbing wildly in the dark."

"We agree, Harry, but... how?"

"Hmm... well, Lupin knew my parents too. And Black, and Pettigrew. He told me so himself."

"But he'll think this all mad! He won't believe a word of it!"

"We could show him the Map?"

"Oh yeah, suspect magical artifact like this, a perfect map of Hogwarts at a time when a crazed lunatic is supposed to be out for Harry's blood, that'll go over swell," Fred said sarcastically.

Something on the map caught Harry's eye. He ran his fingers over the word.

"Wormtail," he whispered.

 _Could it be?_ Harry asked the others in his head with him.

 _ **No, can't be. Ridiculous. A stretch and a half.**_

 __ _But he's a rat. Rat tails look like worms._

 _ **#And 'Moony.' What better nickname for a werewolf? Makes sense if you know, isn't suspicious if you're ignorant.#**_

 _Four friends, four Marauders? What about Padfoot and Prongs?_

 _ **Oh don't be absurd. This is a huge reach.**_

 __ _What better way to find out all this stuff about Hogwarts than to be an animal? Pettigrew could've explored the whole school as a rat, with nobody the wiser._

There was a pregnant pause from Al.

 _ **If Pettigrew was so talentless, how'd he become an animagus? And in school, no less?**_

 _He would've had to have help. Black, our father, both described as 'very talented.' They helped him._

Al reeled in shock, getting the idea.

 _ **Shit. And why help someone else become an animagus and not become one yourself? And those nicknames... Prongs... some kind of antlered animal? Padfoot... Maybe a mountain lion?**_

"The Marauders," Harry said aloud to the twins. "Wormtail is Pettigrew. Moony is Lupin. Padfoot and Prongs are probably either Black or my dad."

"What? How'd you come to that conclusion, Harry?"

"Yeah, seems a bit mad to me."

But this lit a fire under Harry. He looked for Lupin. The man was in his office.

"Only one way to find out," Harry said, picking up the Map, blanking it, and beginning to leave.

"Woah, wait a moment, Harry! Where you going?"

"Yeah, this is lunacy!"

But he ignored them, and walked as fast as he could without running outright; he didn't want to risk Filch's ire, not now.

Harry knocked on Lupin's door, and waited. When the door opened, Lupin looked drawn and haggard.

"Harry. I'm sorry, but I'm still recovering. Can you come back later?"

Harry pushed past him, knocking him back a little. The twins barged in behind him.

"Sorry, Professor," he said, shutting the door and casting privacy spells. "But this is important."

"No, Harry, I'm sorry but-"

"Moony," Harry said, shutting the man up at once. It wasn't easy for him to go any paler, but he did.

"W-what? What did you call me?"

"I called you Moony. You are Moony, right. And Wormtail was Peter Pettigrew."

"H-how do you know those names?"

"You, Pettigrew, Black, and my dad were the Marauders. Right?"

"How do you know that?"

The twins looked from Lupin to each other with a mixture of surprise and delight on their faces.

"Mssrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs?" they exclaimed with glee.

Lupin's own face turned solemn.

"So you found the Marauder's Map, then? But how did you know I'm Moony?"

Harry, with occasional help from the twins, explained what they'd been discussing, and showed Lupin where Pettigrew was on the map. When he saw the name there, he looked like he'd seen a- well, a ghost.

"You're right. The Map never lies, it can't. It always knows who is who. Even if they're disguised, or hidden. This is no glitch. So Peter faked his own death, did he? And Sirius was innocent all along? Hmm... but how to prove it?"

"Good luck on that! Ickle Ronniekins never lets go of that rat if he can help it. Especially these days, keeping him away from that mad cat."

"Mad cat?" asked Lupin.

"Crookshanks. Hermione got him from the Magical Menagerie."

"So he's a magical cat?"

"I guess so," Harry said.

"Which means he must be part kneazle. Ordinary cats are just, well, ordinary. But kneazles are magical. They're like living sneakoscopes, among other things, but they're very dangerous, which is why they're mixed with cats; makes them more friendly and easier to manage. If this Crookshanks is part kneazle, which he must be to be sold as a magical cat, then he's been hunting Scabbers because he knows the rat isn't really a rat."

"So _that's_ what I kept sensing from him! I couldn't make heads or tails of it," Harry said, slapping himself on the forehead. "It also explains why I could sense Scabbers' emotions, since he's not really a rat. And... oh my god! The sneakoscope kept going off around Scabbers!"

"This is fascinating and all, but how're we going to capture Ronnie's pet and prove Harry's godfather is innocent?"

 _OOH! OOH! ME! PICK ME! I WANNA DO IT!_ Zoey shouted in his brain, sending him an image of her jumping up and down in excitement.

"Zoey just volunteered. But I don't know if she has a plan or not, yet."

Lupin looked at them, interested; he hadn't met Zoey yet.

 _Never fear!_

With no warning or glow, Harry was replaced by Zoey, who appeared with a very sturdy looking cage in her hand.

"Ron's not in the Great Hall anymore," said George, consulting the Map. "He's almost all the way to the Common Room."

"I'll be right back," the little raven-haired girl with heterochromatic eyes said just before skipping off out the door. But she popped in again quickly first, on a second thought.

"What's the password to Dumbledore's office?"

"I believe it's Custard Cremes. Why?"

"Meet me there, okay?"

"Okay, we will."

"Good," she said sweetly, then skipped off again.

Once Zoey got in the Common Room, she looked around cautiously. Ron was at a table, getting out an Exploding Snap deck. She looked very carefully, and saw a slightly wriggling bulge in one of his pockets. Stifling a giggle, she took out her wand and Disillusioned herself, and put her shoes in the cage before padding silently past Ron, around the room, looking for Crookshanks. But he wasn't down there, so she checked the boys dorms first, in case he was lurking there. Then she went up to the girl's dorms. In one of the rooms she found him. He immediately turned to face her and began to growl a little, before stopping to turn his head in confusion.

"Hi there, Crookshanks. Don't think we've met yet, I'm Zoey Potter. You're trying to catch and expose a fake rat, right?"

They sensed a faint feeling of relief that they interpreted as a 'yes.'

"So am I. He's a bad wizard. I have a cage to keep him in, but I need your help."

If cats could smile, Crookshanks would have, then.

A few minutes later, Crookshanks casually walked down the steps into the Common Room as though just out for a jaunt. Then he went over towards the fire, but approached it in such a way that he could reasonably be expected to have seen the rat bulging in Ron's pocket without raising any suspicion. Then his attention switched to the rat, and he started to approach Ron.

Ron looked up warily at Crookshanks, and stood up. He wasn't going to wait around for that stupid cat to attack him, and went upstairs to the dorms to try to hide Scabbers, keeping an eye on the cat the whole time, until he couldn't see it. Which meant he didn't see Crookshanks smugly sit down and lick his forearms in triumph.

Instead of going to his own dorm, though, he went to Harry's, which meant Zoey had to follow him out, glaring invisibly at him all the way for not doing as she'd expected him to. When he knocked on the door and got no response, he tried the handle; it was unlocked, so he went in. He felt guilty about this, but he figured his friend wouldn't mind, given the circumstances.

This, of course, gave Zoey the chance to put her shoes on the table by the bed, then undo the Disillusionment Charm and pretend to just be getting in. The cage, however, was still Disillusioned.

"Ronnie!" she exclaimed.

He jumped, then turned like a bolt.

"Oh, it's just you. Hi Zoey."

"Whatcha doin in our room without permission?"

"Er, sorry about that, but that mad cat is after Scabbers again, and I need to keep him safe."

"Oh. Hmm... I think I can help with that."

"You can?"

"Sure!"

And with a fake glow, she used her magic to make the cage visible again.

"Well that might help some," he admitted, "but it's also a little dangerous. What if it falls down?"

"Oh I thought of that. Once it's put down, Crookshanks won't be able to knock it over or budge it at all. And he can't get in. Also, if Crookshanks touches the bars, they'll zap him. Harmless, but painful. Won't zap Scabbers, though."

Ron grinned. "Great. Open the door."

She did, and he put Scabbers in; the rat was, for once, not struggling. Then she closed the door, locked it very carefully with her wand, smiled at Ron, and Stupefied him. He fell to the floor with a thud, and she left a note in his hand saying, "Come to Dumbledore's office, I'll be there. Password is 'Custard Cremes.' Love from Zoey. XOXOXO"

Then she grabbed the cage, and made her way to Dumbledore's office.

"Custard Cremes," Lupin said to the gargoyle once Zoey appeared at their side with Scabbers.

As they went up the moving stairs, Lupin looked very carefully at the rat.

"Yes, that's him for sure. I just can't figure out how Padfoot knew, though."

"If you mean who I think you mean, Professor," Zoey said, "He got given the Daily Prophet that had a picture of Scabbers on Ron's shoulder, from the announcement of the Weasleys' trip to Egypt. I think that's how he knew."

"Ah, that explains it. But raises other questions that I shall have to take up with Padfoot."

"Come in," Dumbledore said when they knocked.

He looked curiously at his newest teacher, the Weasley twins, and young Zoey Potter carrying a cage with a rat in it. He also perceived a very nervous air from Professor Lupin.

"What is going on, Remus?"

"Ah, yes. Well, that's all rather complicated, and it will be so much easier to show you, Sir. At least, to get the ball rolling, as it were."

As he lifted his wand, Zoey stopped him. "We're still waiting for Ron. He needs to see this, too."

The words were barely out of her mouth when there was another knock at the door.

"Come in, Mr. Weasley."

Sure enough, Ron came in, looking angry and confused. Then he turned to Zoey and pointed at her.

"Professor Dumbledore, sir! That little cretin stole Scabbers and Stupefied me!"

"Did she? Well I think we should hear what she has to say for herself, then, don't you?"

"Yeah, exactly. Sir," he added at the last moment.

"Just a moment," she said, using her wand to enlarge the cage. She'd made sure to do it so a rat still couldn't escape.

"Impressive transfiguration, Miss Potter. Though unusual, for such a small animal."

"Thank you. Now, Professor Lupin, your turn."

"Gladly."

Lupin pointed his wand at Scabbers. Before Ron could protest, a flash of blue-white light hit the rat. Then they watched as the rat floated up and warped and twisted weirdly until he became an adult man.

Everyone, even those who'd known what to expect, stared in disbelief at this rat-faced man who looked like a fat man who had lost a lot of weight very quickly. Even as a human, his behavior was still rat-like.

"The bloody HELL! You turned my rat into a man! Change him back!"

"Mr. Weasley," Dumbledore said, "I am afraid I must inform you that your pet is not, in fact a rat. He is an animagus, and has been all along. An animagus named Peter Pettigrew."

"Peter...? But he's dead!"

"I taught Peter in school, Mr. Weasley, and knew him after school. I assure you, Peter Pettigrew is quite alive and kneeling in a cage in front of us."

Dumbledore stepped away for a moment to the fireplace, and Floo-called someone. When he was done, Professor Snape stepped out of the fireplace and blinked in astonishment at Pettigrew.

"Pettigrew? Alive? But how?"

"You have the veritaserum, Severus?"

"Yes, headmaster. Shall I administer it?"

"Please do."

Pettigrew tried to avoid Snape, but there wasn't much room in the cage, and Snape used his wand to force the man to open his mouth and take two drops of the potion. Then he relaxed in the cage, looking a little dreamy, and Dumbledore began to question him.

When he was done, he used the Floo to summon Fudge. The Minister, too, was shocked. Naturally, there was more questioning.

"Quite distressing, Dumbledore, quite distressing indeed," said Fudge when it was over, and Aurors were taking Pettigrew away to Azkaban to await trial.

"I think it seems clear, now, that Sirius Black is innocent, and thus the dementors shall have to be recalled to Azkaban?" Dumbledore said calmly.

"Oh yes, quite right. And I shall have to grant Black a full pardon, once all the necessary work has been done, of course. But in a week or two he should be pardoned, and I shall be recalling the dementors this very night, and calling off the search for Black."

"Good. I am sure all of my students will appreciate the change in atmosphere when the dementors are gone."

When the people from the ministry were gone at last, Dumbledore turned to Zoey and the others. Ron was sitting on the ground, still looking stunned.

"Don't worry, Ronniekins," said George. "We'll get you another pet, once we scrounge up some money."

"Yeah, it's partly our fault he's gone, after all; Harry and us were talking, and one thing led to another, you know..."

"...and that's how we ended up like this, little bro. Sorry."

Ron made a non-committal noise.

"If everyone but Miss Potter would please exit the room for now...?" Dumbledore said. They nodded, and left.

When everyone was gone, Dumbledore said, "Well, Miss Potter, it seems your godfather will be pardoned. He will likely need to spend the rest of the school year in St. Mungo's to recover physically from his ordeal in Azkaban and being on the run, but I daresay you might very well have a proper guardian this summer, if all goes well."

"Cool!" Zoey exclaimed. "That's brilliant!"

"Quite. And now, little Miss, off to your room again. It is almost curfew."

End note: So there we are, what a game changer! I'm finally getting away from my bad habit of following the canon! WOOT! More to come in a week or two!


	18. Pardons, Patronuses, and Coming Out

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 18"**

By = Fayanora

Chapter Eighteen: Pardons, Patronuses, and Coming Out

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for any bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. It's been frustrating me, too, but some things are just too perfect already to change.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Harry,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__

Note 4: Transphobes are weird. They'll come in and read a story where Harry is a multiple and transforms into two different girls, and that doesn't bother them. But make Harry figure out she's transgender and suddenly it's an issue? Anyway, once more: If you don't like Harry changing her sex to female and her name to Adira, then please simply stop reading the fic without telling me about your bigotry, because I don't care. If you're a transphobe, your opinion is utterly without worth. And whining about my distaste for your bigotry is like whining about Harry defending himself from Dudley's punches. My wanting to be free from people who hate me just because of my gender identity does not, will not, and can never equal or exceed your hatred for people who are transgender. As to the excuse of "it's just a preference," that's just your way of pretending you're not a bigot. As long as trans women are murdered at a rate of 1 in 12 just for being trans, I have every right to not want to have your transphobic bullshit in my inbox. Unless people who don't like transgender people start dying at a rate of 1 in 12 due to being targeted specifically for being transphobes, you don't have any room to complain about "reverse bigotry." Cisphobia is NOT A THING. It does not exist. It will not exist unless cis people are murdered at a high rate just for being cis, which will likely never happen. So either shut up or go join the KKK, the Christian Right, the MRAs, or some other group of oppressors who think that their opinion being thought of as unimportant by the oppressed is the same thing as being oppressed.

 _Note 5: I can't respond to guest reviews, so if you're going to review, please do it logged in so I can reply. Anyway, I'm going to try to respond to a guest question here. The question was "does your entire collective enjoy writing, or does just one of your collective do the fanfic, mostly?" My answer:_

 _In our collective, it's a bit hard to answer that question. We all co-front, and it's not always clear who is doing or thinking what. But it seems to be a group effort, at least among the members who have inspired members of the Potter collective (Alex, Molly, and Pi), also Tempest and Fayanora Ahnabahn._

Note 6: Sorry this took so long. Among other things, I wrote the same scene twice and had to untangle that mess.

X

 _"SIRIUS BLACK PARDONED; TRUE CULPRIT IN AZKABAN FOR LIFE,_ " read the headline, when it came. All the details were out, now. Peter Pettigrew was in prison for life, the Potters' godfather was pardoned, and now the whole world would know how and why. Or at least, all of the UK would know.

The day after the newspaper reported this, Sirius Black showed up at the front door of Hogwarts looking very much the worse for wear, and was immediately taken to the Hospital Wing. Harry was pulled out of class to come meet him before his transfer to St. Mungo's.

"There you are, Potter," Madam Pomfrey said when he came in. "He's right this way. He's in a private ward so people wouldn't gawp at him. I'll let you two get acquainted; I'll be in my office if you need me."

"Thank you, Madam Pomfrey."

When the matron left, Sirius beamed at Harry.

"Harry. We meet again."

"Yeah, we do. Only I don't remember the first time."

"Makes sense. Most infant memories don't last."

"Except really traumatic ones?"

] "I guess so. Not sure. Why? You don't... remember it, do you?"

"Sorry to be such a bummer. But yeah. And when I thought it was you, well... I didn't take it so well."

"But you figured it out. You kept an open mind, and figured it out."

"I saw Pettigrew's name on the Map."

"Oh yeah, Moony told me you found that old thing. Or rather, the Weasley Twins found it and gave it to you. Excellent, that. It was a wrench, losing it to Filch all those years ago."

Harry walked up to hold Sirius's hand, since Alastair had already done his soul-reading thing and confirmed what they'd already suspected to be true. Sirius teared up as he looked at Harry's hand in his.

"Well, you've had quite a life, from what I hear," Sirius said. "You're a whole bunch of different people, from the sound of it. What's that like?"

"Noisy, at times. But I'm rarely ever lonely. And it's really useful with classes, a whole team of people on my side to help me learn things, each with their own specialties."

Sirius gave a loud bark of laughter, and hugged Harry's head.

"Good to see you have a sense of humor, still, after what I hear those Dursleys did to you. I wish I could've been there to save you from that, Harry."

Harry shrugged. "Yeah, well, you were in prison. You couldn't have done anything."

"Yeah. Doesn't mean it doesn't still bother me, though. But anyway, once I get mended up, I can get into my Gringott's account and get us a flat somewhere, probably London, for convenience. I have a house I inherited from my parents, but I detest the place, and it'll be full of all kinds of dark creatures and worse, since the property was mis-managed after my parents died. So how do you feel about that, living with me?"

"Yes! I want that very much. Hogwarts is very boring when nobody else is around."

Sirius barked again with laughter.

"Too true, that. That is, if you don't know how to make your own fun."

"By the way, how'd you escape prison? I wasn't around to hear that part."

"Ah, well, I'm an animagus. Still unregistered, I'll have to register at some point now. My animagus form is a large black dog. I knew I was innocent, which wasn't a happy thought, so the dementors couldn't take it from me; that kept me sane enough that I could change into a dog sometimes. One night, the minister stopped by and let me have his copy of the Prophet. It was the one with you and the Weasleys in Egypt. When I saw Peter was at Hogwarts, sitting on Ron's shoulder, I turned into a dog to escape. The dementors were confused by that."

"Cool. Zoey figured that's how you knew about Pettigrew. Hey, maybe you can teach me how to be an animagus."

"Sure thing, Harry. Given your transformation ability, you should have a knack for it. Not sure how having other people in your head with you will affect the process; for all I know they might each have their own form. But we'll have to do it through proper channels, with Ministry help. Us three doing it on our own was stupidly dangerous, we shouldn't have done it. So many things could have gone horribly wrong."

"Okay, safety first. I agree. Of course, I don't even know if I could do it."

"What with your constant friends?"

Harry laughed.

"Odd way of phrasing it, but yeah."

"Well I'll be here for you either way."

"Thanks."

"Oh, by the way, before I forget, I have something to tell you. I hear you got a Firebolt for Christmas."

"Yeah, I did. Of course, it's being checked over for..." he paused, looking up at Sirius. "You didn't!"

Sirius barked with laughter several times before speaking.

"Yes, yes, that was me. Thirteen years of birthday presents in one go I had to make up for."

"Well, I can tell McGonagall to stop checking it for jinxes, now."

"That's right, Harry. You sure can."

"Though how you did it when you were on the run..."

"First, the goblins don't give a tinker's cuss about wizard laws; I could've walked right in and they wouldn't have minded. But the other witches and wizards, well... let's just say I went in as a dog with a note and the key to the vault, and they didn't ask any questions. I did the same thing to buy the Firebolt. The shop owner looked like he wanted to say something, but all that gold shut him up right quick."

Harry grinned. Then there was a silence that drew out as he got thoughtful.

"Um... Sirius?"

"What is it, kiddo?"

"There's something else as well. I... I figured something out about myself recently. I've only told a few people – Ron, Hermione, Healer Young, Madam Pomfrey, and Professor McGonagall – but it's important, and eventually everyone will need to know, but I'm gonna tell you now, if I can get it out..."

"What is it?" Sirius asked, seriously.

"Well, I... I don't want to be called Harry anymore. I have a new name for myself."

"Oh?"

"Nothing against the name, it just doesn't really feel right for me. Never did, come to that. But it's more than just the name. It's what the name represents. And I don't mean the unwanted fame or the baleful destiny stuff, either. I mean... well... I'd rather be called Adira. Adira Lily Jamie Potter."

"Wait, I thought Harry was the one who looked like James. I didn't realize-"

"That's right. Harry is the name of the one who looks like James. With Lily's eyes."

Sirius was looking very confused for a moment. Then it clicked.

"Oh. _OH._ "

Adira sighed. "You're the second person to respond that way."

"Sorry, just... so, er... in your heart of hearts, you're a girl?"

"Yes. And despite my appearance, I, well... I made some modifications down below, if you get my drift."

"Ah, I see."

Harry wrung his hands.

"You still like me, don't you?"

"Yes, Har—er... do I call you Adira? You're only out to a few people so far, you said."

"I prefer Adira. But yeah, in public it's still Harry. For now."

"Right you are. Adira, then. Anyway, Adira, of course I still love you. You're my—well, my god-daughter. And I'm still your loveable old dogfather!"

Adira/Harry laughed at the joke.

"I'm not going to judge you badly for something like that, Adira. I would've accepted you even if you'd been a Slytherin! Besides, I dated a trans woman for a few weeks after I graduated Hogwarts. Lovely Muggle woman. But she was looking for someone a little more serious than me, if you'll pardon the pun."

Adira laughed again.

"So, what are you being treated for, anyway? I mean, you look like crap warmed over, but what specifically?"

"Oh, nutrient potions, some things to help my muscle tone, Dreamless Sleep for the nightmares, chocolate, because of all the dementors here at the school as well as Azkaban."

"That must be nice, your first taste of chocolate in 12 years."

Sirius's face grew rapturous. "Amen to that! It was heavenly! I'll have to stop by Honeydukes sometime when I'm better, get some more. Anyway, no comment on my offhanded mention of nightmares?"

Adira shrugged. "I'm all too familiar with nightmares myself. After what you've been through, it would have surprised me if you _hadn't_ been getting nightmares. Are they gonna get you a mind healer at St. Mungo's?"

"Yeah, probably a whole team of them. The Ministry is very contrite about the whole thing. Still, I'd be very surprised if there wasn't an inquiry about the fact I never got a trial."

He sounded understandably angry when he said this.

Adira opened her mouth to speak again, but Madam Pomfrey came in then.

"That's quite enough, Potter. Let your godfather rest, he needs it after what he's been through."

"Oh now, Poppy, have a heart! I've only met one of the Potters so far. Haven't even met the others yet! And I really want to meet Alastair. Heard he's a handsome devil."

"Yes, well, there will be plenty of time for that later. I daresay they will be able to visit you in St. Mungo's over the easter holidays. For now, you need more rest."

Sirius sighed heavily. "Fine, fine. You win, Poppy. Anyway, Adira, you lot be good. Don't let my infirmity keep you from doing well in school!"

She laughed again. "I won't, Sirius. I'll do well in school. But I'll write you letters!"

"Ah, something to look forward to. More than flirting with the female Healers, anyway."

But Madam Pomfrey shooed Adira out the door, a bottle of Dreamless Sleep in one hand, and a measuring cup in the other. So Adira left, reluctantly.

She didn't go any further, though. Instead, she traded places with Al, who was still glowing when he burst back into the ward.

" _Mister_ Potter," the matron said exasperatedly, "Do please not-"

"Well look at that pathetic old mutt just laying there like a wounded puppy!" Al said over the matron's words, breaking past her to hug Sirius.

When they pulled apart, the two just stared at each other, agog.

"Fine, fine. A few more minutes, then. But no more than that."

"Hell's bells," Sirius exclaimed. "I didn't believe it, but ye gods! You look _exactly_ like I did at your age! Just how Adira looks like James."

"Yeah. I hear Iliana's resemblance to Lily is equally uncanny. Those two I understand, but I'm still at a loss as to why I look like you. Unless... wizards don't have a way of making sure there's two fathers, do they?"

At this, Sirius turned bright red with embarrassment, and the matron actually burst out laughing; the first time they'd ever heard her do more than a quick chuckle of amusement. When she regained her wits, she shook her head.

"No, Mr. Potter, that hasn't happened yet, to my knowledge. Just the one father, I'm afraid. One father, one mother."

"Well damn. Still a mystery, then. Unless there's something you want to tell us, Sirius?"

Sirius started coughing, having choked on his own spittle in his chagrin.

"Out, Mr. Potter, this time for good," Madam Pomfrey said, still chuckling herself as she shooed him out of the ward. "Before you make him die from laughter!"

 _ **Well, there are worse ways to go,**_ Al thought.

"Honestly," he heard her say as he left, "one of them is bad enough, but _two_? You two will be the death of us all, I swear..."

The next day, when Adira was back, she sought out the twins during some free time, and once more dragged them into a spare classroom, with privacy spells put up behind them.

"Harry, mate, something else happening? What else could possibly be going on?"

"Yeah, what's up?"

"In all the excitement over Sirius, there's something important I forgot. Two things, actually. First, thanks for all your help with that stuff. I really appreciate it."

"It was nothing, Harry, honestly!"

"Anything for a friend, right Fred?"

"Aye, George. I'd risk life and limb for Harry here, any day of the week."

"Me too!"

"It's nothing like that, guys, really!"

Sensing their friend's serious mood, they sat down and waited.

"Right. So... this is getting difficult, this is the fifth time I've done this, and it doesn't really get any easier..."

She stood up and started pacing. They watched her, glancing occasionally at each other as they did, in silent communication.

"I... I don't like the name Harry. Never have, really. But more than that, well..." she breathed in, like preparing to rip off a bandage. "Like Sirius put it when I told him, in my heart of hearts I'm actually... actually a girl."

The twins sighed, relieved.

"We thought you were gonna tell us something bad, like you were taken deathly ill, or murdered someone," George said. Fred nodded.

"Wait, what? That's... I wasn't expecting a reaction like that."

"Yeah, well, we've been talking about it lately, and we'd noticed some things about you that didn't seem easily explainable even with the others in your head with you."

"We reckoned either there was someone new, or you were transgender."

"How is it that so many people know that word? I only know it because I read it in a Muggle library book once."

"I can't speak for the others, but Fred and I spend time in Muggle places when we can. Bookstores, magic trick shops, places to buy tools for lock-picking, so on. What with the Trace, it's useful to know how to do things the Muggle way. Wizards never check for that stuff."

"Yeah, and we may have run into a book like the one you did, mate."

"Well that's a relief. But something tells me my luck is doomed to run out soon."

"Who're you planning to tell next, mate? Or have you decided yet?"

"Oh yeah, and do you have a new name for yourself yet?"

"Um... last question first: Adira Lily Jamie Potter. Other question: Well, probably Ginny."

The twins both winced, hissing as if in pain.

"What? You don't think I should?"

"No, that's not it. You should definitely tell her before you tell anyone else, though. If she hears it from someone else, or you tell many more people before her, and... well... it won't be pretty no matter what, but the more people know before she does, the worse it'll be."

"So yeah, Ginny next for sure, but be prepared for tears and recriminations."

"And wailing and gnashing of teeth."

"And bat-bogey hexes."

"Or worse."

Adira winced. "That bad, eh?"

"She has a serious crush on you, mate. With you being a girl... well... no telling how she'll take that, exactly, but seeing as she's only fancied boys so far, well... you see the problem."

"Yeah, I do. I don't want to, but I do. Well, thanks for the warning."

"No problem."

Morosely, Adira left the room, lost in thought about Ginny.

On Thursday, Adira still hadn't plucked up the courage to tell Ginny. She was thinking about this off and on throughout the day, and was lost in thought when she quite literally ran into Professor Lupin.

"Oh, sorry sir! I was lost in thought."

"I noticed. It's quite alright. Worrying about Sirius?"

"No, he's on the mend. I was thinking of... something else."

"Well it's a good thing I found you. I know the Dementors have been recalled, but if you're still interested in lessons on how to fight them off, I'm still willing and able."

"Really? Yeah, that sounds great. After all, who knows; I might run into them again someday."

"Indeed. Tonight at 7?"

"Sounds good to me, Professor."

"Well, I shall see you in my office at 7, then."

She nodded, and they parted ways.

After that night's lesson, Adira was exhausted. Lupin had found a boggart, and of course when it saw her, it turned into a Dementor, with all the same effects. She'd also heard her parents again, both of them, which disturbed her. But she was determined to learn the charm.

Despite her exhaustion, when she saw Ginny reading in the common room, she went over and sat next to her. Ginny looked up and turned beet red.

"Hi Ginny. Listen, there's something I want to talk with you about, but I don't want other people overhearing. I have my own room, we can talk there."

Ginny stammered and stuttered, but finally managed to say, "You're... inviting me up to your room?"

Now it was Adira's turn to turn red.

"Not like that, of course. Just... we won't be overheard there."

Looking perplexed, Ginny closed her book. "Now?"

"If you're not busy."

"Oh this? I'm almost done with it. I can put the rest off for now. I could use a break, anyway."

Putting the book in her bag, Ginny dropped her things off in her dorm first, then followed Adira up to her room.

Adira closed the door behind them, cast privacy spells, then turned to the redhead, who was turning even redder in the head at being in her crush's bedroom.

"I've told several other people this – Hermione, Ron, Sirius, McGonagall, and the twins – and, well, it never gets any easier." She breathed in deeply to fortify herself.

"What is it, Harry?"

"I... well... I've figured something out about myself lately, that was some time in the making. And though we don't know each other well, you have this crush on me, so I figured I should tell you before the whole school finds out..."

"Oh my... are you gay?"

"What? No, not gay. Bisexual, actually." She paused a moment. "Which makes you only the second person I've told _that_ to. But no, it's something else."

"Okay," Ginny said, looking like she couldn't think what else it could be.

"Well, it, uh... it turns out that Iliana and Zoey are not the only girls in the collective. I – the one you know as Harry, in case it wasn't obvious, I've figured out I'm actually a girl, too. I just... didn't realize it til recently."

She looked up at Ginny, and could see understanding and denial in those eyes. The redhead crossed her arms as though hugging herself.

"I don't... what do you mean?"

"I mean that I'm a girl. And I don't want to be called Harry anymore. I want to be called Adira. My new full name is Adira Lily Jamie Potter."

Ginny was going red again, but it wasn't embarrassment. It was anger. Adira focused on the emotions coming off the girl, and found the anger was going off in random direction, aimless, not focused on any one person. Some of it was even focused inward, back on Ginny.

"Are you... you're not joking, are you?"

"No. I wouldn't joke about something like this."

The confusion in her emotions increased, though this was of a different flavor than her previous confusion.

"Um... Ginny?" Adira said, after almost an entire minute had passed in silence. "Ginny? Are you, well... are you okay?"

"Sorry, Harry. I mean, what was that name again?"

"Adira."

"Um... yeah, Adira, sorry. I just... I don't know what to think about this. I don't know what to feel about it. I mean, I want to be supportive, I do, but... I have a crush on you. And now you're a girl? Does that make me gay? Do I even still have a crush on you now? _Should_ I? I just..."

Her eyes watered, tears running down her cheeks.

"I feel..."

Her feelings switched to anger again.

"Wait, you told the twins before telling me?"

"Sorry. But yeah, I know them a lot better than I know you."

She could sense Ginny's emotions shifting again. Ginny opened her mouth to speak, but closed it, then ran out of the room suddenly. Adira could sense her crying, even though she couldn't hear it.

Sitting down on her bed, she sighed.

"That could have gone better," she told herself aloud.

"Yeah," said Ron from the doorway, "but it could've gone worse, too."

"Hi Ron. Been there long?"

"I was just coming down to check if you were here when Ginny ran past me. I made a clever guess about why she was upset. You told her?"

"Yeah, I told her."

"Mind if I sit down?"

"Go ahead."

They didn't speak for several minutes. But when the silence was finally broken, it was Adira who spoke.

"I can't do this for everyone in the castle. I'll do it for Luna and maybe Neville, but then, I don't know. I need everyone to know, but I don't want to make a spectacle of it."

"Yeah... hmm... have you thought about just, you know, doing it? I mean, just not making a big deal of it? Hold on, I'm not saying this right."

Ron thought a few moments before speaking again.

"Okay, I think I got it now. I mean like, just _being_ Adira, making it obvious without overdoing it. When people ask, then you can just be like 'I am the person formerly known as Harry. Call me Adira,' and then let the grapevine do the rest."

"Maybe. But the problem with the Hogwarts grapevine is it has a tendency to garble things. But I'll think about it. It's an option, anyway. Thanks, Ron."

"You're welcome, mate. And I'll be here for you, come Hell or high water or Slytherin taunting."

Adira laughed. "Thanks."

The next day, after classes were over, Adira went over to the Ravenclaw table during dinner and spoke with Luna. This wasn't unusual, as they had been spending time at least twice a week all year hanging out with Luna, either at the Ravenclaw table or in the library after.

"Hello, Harry. How are you?"

"I'm good. And you?"

"Oh, mostly good. I just wish whoever stole my book on crumple-horned snorcacks would return it."

Adira glared up the Ravenclaw table at the others, some of whom were turning away very suspiciously at her gaze.

"Yes, I hope so too. I'd hate to have to send a load of snakes into the Ravenclaw dorms. Puts the poor creatures at such risk of harm, you know."

Luna smiled serenely. "That is very true," she said, nodding sagely.

No doubt about it, some of the people there were getting very nervous. That book would be returned by bedtime, she knew.

"You let me know if anything else goes missing, okay Luna? After all, snakes tend to hibernate this time of the year, and they get very grumpy if disturbed."

"Of course, Harry."

Several Ravenclaws in Luna's year suddenly left the table, looking panic-stricken.

"Anyway, Luna, I got off track," Adira said very quietly near Luna's ear. "Meet me in the entrance hall after dinner, I have something to tell you, and I'd prefer privacy."

"Yes, I think I can do that," she replied happily, before taking a bite of pudding.

Adira went back to her own seat at the Griffindor table and ate quickly, skipping pudding herself so as to be in the entrance hall quicker. She needn't have bothered, though; Luna didn't come out until shortly after Adira did, as she'd been watching for Adira.

"Where do we go, then?"

"I know of a spare classroom we can use," Adira answered. "This way."

She led Luna along the corridors and into a spare classroom not far from the library. It was, in fact, the same one the Mirror of Erised had once been in. Adira cast privacy spells on the door and the walls, including one she'd read about recently, a sort of poltergeist repelling charm. The last thing she needed, after all, was Peeves overhearing and spreading things about the school ahead of schedule. Peeves, after all, would not be kind.

"There, that should do it."

"What did you want to tell me, Harry?"

Perhaps it was Luna's serene energy affecting Adira, or perhaps Luna's straightforward nature was rubbing off on her, but Adira felt none of the usual nerves.

"My name is Adira, now. Adira Lily Jamie Potter."

"That's a lovely name, Adira. It's elegant."

"Thank you."

"Does this mean you're a girl now?"

"Yes, it does. I'm not out to everyone yet, though, so I'm still Harry in public for now. Or just Potter."

Luna nodded. "You know, my father is the editor of a magazine called The Quibbler. He could put in a very tasteful coming out announcement for you, if you'd like."

"Um... well, I don't know if I want to go that far. It's not like I've even changed my name legally, yet. Come to think of it, that's something I need to look into."

"It's fine. It was just a suggestion. That is, if you want to come out to everyone."

"That is the eventual goal. I just... I mean, once the whole school knows, it will eventually leak to the press, but in the meantime, I'd rather not bring any more attention to myself than I have to."

"You could just cast aside the old you and embrace the new you like it's no big deal. I know people talk about you behind your back, but they're mostly polite to your face. It may be the same way with this. But even if not, I'll be here for you."

"Um... Thanks, Luna. That's... not the _most_ comforting thing you could say, but I can't fault your honesty. And I'm glad to have a friend like you."

"And I'm very glad to be your friend. Having friends is still something of a new experience for me."

She nodded. "I know how that goes. I didn't have any friends until Hogwarts. Dudley scared off anyone who might've tried."

"Are you telling anyone else in person?"

"Neville's the last one I have planned. I like him. I want to be friends with him, not just acquaintences."

"Neville seems nice. He doesn't feel comfortable around me, but he hides it better than most people. He's very polite that way."

"Yeah. You may be unusual, but he's one of those people who knows what it's like to be bullied, so it makes sense he's polite to you."

She nodded.

"You know, Adira, you could speak with your head of House about coming out."

"Yeah. I did once, a little, but I wasn't ready then."

"And you are now?"

"Probably. Being Harry feels like a lie, at best. I need to be me."

"Being yourself is always the best person to be, I've found. A lot easier to keep track of, for one."

"No argument there."

Ginny avoided them in the morning, which was fine by them. If she needed space and time to process things, then she could have it, and it was a Saturday anyway. They went about their day, and after Quidditch practice, they switched from Iliana to Adira so Adira could stop by Professor McGonagall's office.

"Yes, Potter? What is it?"

"May I come in?"

"Yes, come in, come in."

She went in, the Professor closing the door behind her.

"Do sit down, Potter."

She did as instructed, and the teacher sat down as well.

"Is this about your Firebolt, by any chance?"

"Um, no. But now that you mention it, Sirius told me he sent it to me to make up for all those missed birthdays. And since he's innocent, you don't need to check it for jinxes anymore."

"Ah yes, I had wondered, but it kept slipping my mind. I shall fetch it for you after we're done here. I take it you came for another reason, then?"

"Yes. Well, I've been coming out to my friends. So far Sirius, Ron, Hermione, the Weasley Twins, Ginny Weasley, Healer Young, Madam Pomfrey, and you know about it. I still want to tell Neville in person. And now that I think about it, Professor Lupin as well. But after that, well... I don't really know. I need the rest of the school to know, so I can be myself in public, but I hate drawing attention to myself."

"Hmm... yes, I see your point." She began to go through the files in her file folder. "Well what we usually do when someone needs to change their status partway through their school career is to post notices to the different Houses about it. Prefects make sure everyone sees them. The notices note that... well, here's an old example," she said, pulling out a file.

"This one is very old, and the person it is about died in the last war, so I don't think he will mind."

She handed it to them. They took it and read.

December 12th, 1976

This note is to inform all to whom it may concern that the student you have gotten to know as Aileen Morgenstern is now Luca Morgenstern. His sex has changed to that of male, and he will be treated as such, and his new proper name used, or there will be detentions with our caretaker, Apollyon Pringle. If you do not think you can use Mr. Morgenstern's first name, you may refer to him by his surname. But you will refer to him with "he," "his," and "him" pronouns all the same.

The note wasn't signed by McGonagall, but by the deputy headmaster of the day.

"This looks good. It kinda does bring attention to me, but I guess that can't be helped. Okay, I'm good with this."

"It will naturally be adapted to you. What is your new name, Miss Potter?"

"Adira Lily Jamie Potter."

McGonagall's eyes watered, and she smiled. "Lovely choice."

She waved her wand and a piece of blank parchment appeared. With another wave of her wand, she filled it out. Then she handed the parchment to Adira.

January 9, 1994

This note is to inform all to whom it may concern that the student you have gotten to know as Harry James Potter is now Adira Lily Jamie Potter. Her sex has changed to that of female, and she will be treated as such, and her new proper name used, or there will be detentions with our caretaker, Argus Filch. If you do not think you can use Miss Potter's new first name, you may refer to her by her surname. But you will refer to her with "she" and "her" pronouns all the same.

Sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall,

Deputy Headmistress,

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

"It's dated tomorrow, Professor."

"Yes, well, it's getting late today, but we will begin distribution tomorrow morning if that's what you want. We can do it another time if you'd like, though."

"No, Professor, tomorrow is fine. People can get their gossiping about me done during the remainder of the weekend. And it gives me time to tell Neville and Professor Lupin."

McGonagall chuckled. "Quite. Was there anything else, Miss Potter?"

"Well yes, Professor, just one other thing: what spell did you use to fill out the page?"

"The incantation is _scribo_ , but the spell itself is very difficult to learn and to use, as it takes a great deal of concentration. I wouldn't recommend using it for your homework, Miss Potter. I rarely use it myself, but this was a rare circumstance when it made sense to do so."

"I'll keep that in mind, Professor."

"Good. Now you should run along, if you wish to have time to tell Professor Lupin before dinner."

Adira nodded and left to find Lupin.

Adira knocked on Professor Lupin's office door, hoping he was still in there.

"Come in," she heard him say. She turned the knob and entered.

"Harry," Lupin said in surprise, putting down his quill. (He'd been grading papers.) "What brings you to my office on a Saturday?"

She closed the door and sat down in front of his desk.

"I have something I need to tell you. Everyone will know tomorrow morning, but I wanted to tell you first. I've already told my friends and Sirius, and it's just you and Neville left before everyone finds out tomorrow."

Lupin sat up a little straighter, being more attentive.

"What is it, Harry?"

"I've been struggling with something for some time. I think I always knew, in some way, but over the summer, the truth hit me hard, and I've gotten to the point where I can't live a lie anymore. I have to be myself."

Lupin nodded. "Go on."

"Well it's about my gender. I always thought I was a boy, because everyone said I was. In fact, until kindergarten, I thought 'boy' was my name, because the Dursleys never called me anything else. But I'm not a boy, I'm a girl. And my... our ability gave me the ability to completely change my sex. Which I've done, though it isn't obvious right now. But tomorrow or Monday, I'm going to look the part more."

She stopped abruptly, looking to Lupin for a response. He smiled.

"Sex change, eh? Glad to hear you're able to be true to yourself. I've known a few transexual—or, I suppose the term now is transgender—people over the years. Have you chosen a new name for yourself?"

"Adira Lily Jamie Potter."

Lupin smiled in the same way McGonagall had earlier. "It's a lovely name, Adira."

"Thanks," she said, smiling back.

Silence fell, in which Adira started thinking, concerned. Her mood must've shown on her face, because Lupin asked her, "What's the matter?"

"I was just thinking about how the Dursleys would react to this if they knew. And it made me wonder how my parents... how they'd feel about it."

"Adira, your mother and father loved you very much. They were friends with someone they knew to be a werewolf. They were open minded and open hearted souls, especially with those they loved and cared for."

"Yeah, but you didn't choose to be a werewolf, you just got bitten."

"True. But you didn't choose to be transgender, either. You chose to acknowledge the truth of your soul, that much is a choice, but being transgender isn't a choice, from what I understand. Given how people – wizards and Muggles alike, in our country and others – are about these kinds of things, if being transgender was a choice, nobody would choose it. In some other cultures, maybe; I understand there are cultures where transgender people are recognized as a third gender, just as valid as the other two. Some cultures even have many more than 2 or 3 genders."

"Wow!"

"Yes. And non-human cultures have interesting gender ideas as well. Tell me, have you ever seen a female goblin?"

"Er... I don't think so."

"Well you have, and you haven't. Goblins don't care for the concept of gender; they don't identify as male or female, just as goblins. So likely you _have_ seen goblins capable of getting pregnant, and never knew it."

"Yeah, and the centaurs treat gender the way we treat clothes; something fun to play with, but ultimately unimportant. According to Firenze, anyway. But that doesn't explain how you know about these things."

"Oh, I love studying other cultures. It came about from my love of history. See, I so enjoyed learning history in school that I wanted to learn Muggle history, too. Which led me to the history of other countries, and other cultures. I enjoy reading so much, I try to get work at bookstores when I can, and I use the Muggle public libraries when I can, too."

"You _like_ history?"

"Yes. History, especially History of Magic, is a lot more interesting than Professor Binns makes it sound. Professor Binns could make Quidditch sound dull, trust me on this."

"Yeah, we really need a better History of Magic teacher. If you're such a history buff, you could do it, if you weren't already teaching Defense. But two classes at once? I imagine that would be very hard to do."

Lupin chuckled. "Yes, indeed. In fact, it's funny you should mention me teaching History. Dumbledore remembered my History of Magic scores very well. I was the only person in the whole school during my O.W.L. year to get an O on History of Magic. O means 'Outstanding,' it's the best grade you can get on O.W.L.'s. Anyway, I was also the only person to even _take_ History of Magic to N.E.W.T. level. Got an O there, as well."

"Wow. That's impressive."

"Yes. Dumbledore seems to think so, too. In fact, he came to me the day before our first anti-Dementor lesson, and asked me if, at the end of the year, I would switch from DADA to History of Magic, replacing Binns."

"But you're the best Defense teacher we've ever had! Why would he want you to switch?"

"Well, I wondered the same, and debated it with him. As it turns out, H—Adira, the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts is indeed cursed, by Voldemort."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"Why?"

"Well, as to that... is it correct that you met Voldemort as a 16 year old down in the Chamber of Secrets?"

"Yes. He looked a lot different. I mean, I've never seen him in his original body from before his fall, but I saw him sticking out of the back of Quirrell's head, and he was hideous. But as 16 year old Tom Riddle, he was handsome. If he hadn't been an evil git, I..." she blushed. "But yeah, he was different."

"Indeed. And he tried to secure the DADA position, right out of school. He was told he was too young, then. Dumbledore says he came back years later, looking very distorted from dark magics, no longer handsome as he was, but not yet fully Voldemort. He asked Dippet for the job first, but the second time, Dumbledore was Headmaster."

"Voldemort tried to teach DADA?"

"Yes. This was before the war, you understand. Dumbledore thinks he wanted to use his position as teacher to recruit new Death Eaters while they were still young. For that reason, Dumbledore refused him. And we haven't been able to keep a DADA teacher for a whole school year ever since. Quirrell had been a quite ordinary Muggle Studies teacher before getting the DADA position, and only over the summer, while studying for his new position, did he run into Voldemort and get seduced to the dark side."

"So does that mean you're worried that if you don't take Dumbledore's offer to be History teacher, that you might... might _die_ like Quirrell did?"

"Something like that. Of the two other teachers you've had in this subject so far, one died, and one is still in a coma in St. Mungo's. Others, I'm told, retired from teaching from stress related health concerns, lost close family members mysteriously, had horrible disfiguring accidents, or ended up in the mental ward of St. Mungo's, having gone mad. One chap was independently wealthy, only did teaching as a diversion. Before the year was over, his many stock investments had crashed horribly, and businesses he'd invested in did so poorly he lost most of his wealth. What was left was taken after he was investigated for tax evasion, except for his house. Then his house burned down. No idea where he's at, now."

Adira's eyes went wide at these words.

"Yeah, definitely take the History job in that case, Professor."

He chuckled. "Okay, Adira, I think I will, at that. If I do, maybe the curse will let me finish out the year. I may just give up on DADA a week or two in advance just to be on the safe side, though."

"What about Binns, though? What will he do?"

"Probably just keep on teaching History of Magic, completely oblivious to the fact he no longer has any students. I understand he was pretty oblivious even when he was alive. But Dumbledore has been getting complaints about Binns for years. I suppose, what with recent developments, he decided it was time to cave to those pressures."

"Well Defense won't be the same without you, but I look forward to having History with you."

"Indeed? Well now I've decided I _must_ take Dumbledore's offer. Anyway, it's almost dinner, you should get going."

They both stood up and left, then; Adira for dinner, Lupin to speak with Dumbledore.

After dinner, she went back to the common room and found Neville.

"Hey Neville, come with me up to my room, will you?"

"M-me? Why?"

"It's the best place to have a private conversation. Besides, you haven't seen it yet. Are you coming?"

"Well, okay, H-Harry. D-don't know what you could possibly want to talk to m-me about, but I'll come."

Neville followed her upstairs to her new room. They went in, she closed the door, and put up privacy spells.

"What's this about, Harry?"

"Yeah, it's about something that will be common knowledge starting tomorrow, but I wanted you to know first. There are some others I've told as well, too."

"Yes?"

"I know we're not much more than acquaintances, Neville, but I've been thinking I want to be friends with you. Between my unwanted fame, people trying to kill me, and being called a freak behind my back for being... the way we are... I can use every friend I can get, and you've always been nice to me, both in front of and behind me, from what I understand. Even stood up to some of the people calling me a freak, I've heard."

Neville blushed. "It w-was nothing, Harry."

"It wasn't nothing. You were very brave to do it, you didn't have to."

"B-brave? N-no, I was terrified doing it! But it had to be d-done."

"Bravery isn't the lack of fear, it's facing your fear, not letting your fear control you. You have proven many times you're brave. Heck, just continuing to go to Snape's classes when he plainly terrifies you more than most things do is extremely brave."

"B-but I _have_ to go to P-Potions. Gran would kill me if I failed."

"Oh please. The way he torments you in class, you'd be better off skiving and studying the subject on your own. But you go to his classes."

"Maybe you're right," he said quietly. "I'm p-practically failing anyway."

"Iliana is really good at Potions, she could tutor you."

"T-that would be cool. Hermione helps me sometimes, but tutoring? She hasn't done that."

"Good. We can discuss the time later. We've gotten off track. What I wanted to talk to you about is different."

With a deep breath for calm, Adira told him, in much the same way as she'd been doing with others, about her being a girl, and her new name.

"W-wow!" Neville said when she was done, his eyes wide with awe. "I c-can't even imagine being brave enough to have to d-do something like that! You have m-my support, Adira. However much th-that's worth, I mean."

"It means a lot, Neville. You're a good person. The Sorting Hat chose well."

Instead of responding to that, Neville changed the subject.

"S-so, c-can you help me with my Potions homework tonight?"

She beamed at him. "Sure thing, Neville."

That done, Neville got his stuff for potions and Adira helped him with it for an hour before Neville left. Adira locked the door behind him and started experimenting more with her appearance. She paused at times to spend minutes at a time drawing or writing ideas, since it was faster than switching back and forth all the time. By the time she was ready to go to bed, she'd chosen her changes to her form.

First was her hair, which was longer and a lot tamer now, and which she was choosing to wear in a long single braid in the back, with green scrunchies, and a Griffindor hair barrette Hermione had gotten for her somehow. She'd also transfigured her glasses to look much nicer, their color now the same green as the hair scrunchies (thus matching her eyes).

And though it was making her nerves jangle even more with the sheer daring of it, she had also painted her fingernails green. Looking at herself in the mirror, she was reminded of how close they'd gotten to being Sorted into Slytherin. If not for the Griffindor barrette, you'd think she was a Slytherin, for all the green. But it was a nice color, and suited her.

She had a hard time getting to sleep that night, her nerves were in such a high state of dudgeon. She did finally get to sleep, around 3 AM, but her sleep was disrupted by nightmares about being called a freak, a pouf, and worse. In one dream, she was being made to tell the whole class in detail about her treatment at the Dursley's place while people booed at her and called her a liar and an attention-seeking prat. Halfway through, everyone started to laugh and point as she was suddenly naked, and a bunch of people pointed out she had a willy, and said this was proof that she was a liar. She looked down to confirm this, but saw instead a venomous snake growing from there, and it was hissing threateningly at her.

 _'GO AWAY!'_ she hissed at it in Parseltongue. _'LEAVE ME ALONE!'_

 _'NEVER!'_ it answered, and bit her, the pain startling her awake. In a panic, she checked down below; the offending thing wasn't there. Everything looked right to her.

The rest of the night wasn't much better.

Waking up in the morning, her nerves were even worse than before. She couldn't even get out of bed at first; she just lay under the covers, moaning, trying not to cry.

There was a knock at the door. She tried reaching out with her empathic ability to figure out who it was by the general shape of their emotions, but her own nerves made it rather like trying to hear a whisper from across a room when someone was screaming in your ear.

Still, thinking it might be one of her friends, she got out of bed and shakily opened the door a crack, to seen Ron and Hermione standing there.

"We got these today, mate, and Hermione figured you could use some support," Ron said, holding up a copy of the notice she'd had McGonagall pass around. "She's good with this touchy-feely stuff."

"Come in," Adira said weakly, feeling like to say any more would make her puke.

They did, and she closed the door behind them.

"You don't look so well, mate," Ron said.

"Didn't sleep very well. Nerves about today. Nightmares, too."

"Well people are talking about it, sure enough, but in whispers. They don't want to risk detention with Filch."

"Gee thanks, that's so... no, I can't even be sarcastic. That is the opposite of helpful, Ron."

"Sorry. I could make you some tea. Or get you something for breakfast from the Great Hall."

"Thanks for the offer, but I feel like I might lose my breakfast before I even have it."

The two friends kept her company for another few minutes until she finally decided to buck up her courage and get ready to face the day. For which she had to get Ron out of the room so she could change, after her shower. Hermione stayed behind to give her opinion of Adira's dress, an understated dress of indigo with white trim.

"Looks good. A little plain, but good."

"I want plain. I want it to be obvious I'm wearing a dress without being flashy about it. Might make some people be a little less quick to call me attention-seeking."

"You should wear what you want on the weekends, other people be darned. But I also understand why you want this dress. It makes sense. You want to kinda... ease into this change, I think?"

"As opposed to getting dragged into changes before I even know what's going on? Yeah, that's a nice change, even if it is nerve-wracking."

It wasn't easy, leaving her room and going down to the common room, but she managed it, running into Dean and Seamus.

"Hey, H—er, I mean Adira. Did I pronounce it right?"

"Yeah, Dean, that's it exactly."

"Oh good. The note didn't leave a pronunciation guide, and I had to guess. Glad I got it in one."

"Wow. If I'd known you were gonna be this supportive, Dean, I'd have told you personally, sooner."

"Oh, well. Yeah, it's new territory for me, but so was magic, and so was you being a load of other people. This is nothing compared to either of those."

"Thanks."

"Does this mean ya like blokes now?" Seamus blurted out. "You a pouf?"

"If I did just like blokes, well, I'm fully a girl now. And even if I still had a... a thing... being a girl means I would be straight. Not a pouf."

"But you were a bloke, now you're not. Doesn't that make you a pouf?"

She glared at him. "It makes me girl, Seamus. Like any other girl. Would you call Hermione a pouf if she wanted to snog you?"

He blushed. "Er, no, I guess not."

"Then the same applies to me."

 _ **Not telling him you're bi?**_ Al asked her.

 _None of his business, yet. I've only told Ginny and Ron that, and that was more or less an accident. I don't know if I want to come out as bi, yet. In fact, if Seamus's comment is any indication, best to pretend I'm straight for now._

 _ **I dunno. Being bi would kinda throw a monkey wrench into their thinking. He's probably not the only one who thinks being trans is the same as being a pouf.**_

 _Be that as it may, Al, I'm keeping that mostly to myself for now. I want to know more about how such things are viewed in the wizarding world first. Might tell Ron and Hermione soon, but I'm kind of tired of these coming out conversations, so I'm gonna put that on the back burner for now._

"Oh," Seamus said, responding to the last thing she'd said to him after a few seconds pause, snapping her attention back to reality. "Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry if I was being rude."

"You're forgiven. I'd actually rather hear questions like that from someone friendly than from, say, Malfoy."

"Well, I may not really understan', Potter, but I'll kick Malfoy in his teeth if he's rude to ya."

"Thanks for that, but don't bother. I think I want him to say something. I'd love to see McGonagall give him a detention with Filch."

Everyone present laughed at that.

Feeling much better now, Adira actually thought she could eat some breakfast and keep it down, so they all went down to the Great Hall together, ignoring the renewed staring and muttering.

"Check out Malfoy," Ron finally said.

She turned to look up at the Slytherin table. Malfoy was glaring in Adira's general direction.

"Must be sore he can't tease me for this," she told Ron, returning to her breakfast.

"Yeah. He certainly never misses an opportunity to call you names or pretend to be fighting himself like he's two people split down the middle. Pity he's apparently too smart to open his mouth about your gender."

"Also a pity I can't goad him into saying something. Pretty sure McGonagall would consider that to be manipulative and put me in detention right next to Malfoy."

"Wonder if he'll try to catch you alone somewhere to bully you then. Or in Potions."

"Oh god, Snape. What's he gonna be like?"

"Probably ignore you. He ignores Iliana," Hermione pointed out.

"Yeah, but she looks like my mum, and he fancied her. He still picks on me, and he loathes Al."

"He might ease up on Al, now he knows Sirius is innocent."

Adira snorted. "I doubt it. They hated each other in school. Sirius being innocent _and_ free, he'll probably hate Al more than ever."

As it turned out, they didn't have to wait for Potions to be bullied by Malfoy and his cronies. Monday after lunch was Care of Magical Creatures with the Slytherins. As the Griffindors approached the area of Hagrid's cabin, they spotted the snakes already there, waiting to ambush Adira.

"Hey look, everyone," Malfoy said, "it's the Potter pouf. I'm surprised you aren't wearing a pink frilly dress to class today."

"Why, do you have one for me to borrow, Malfoy?" she asked casually.

Even some of the Slytherins were having a hard time suppressing their laughter at this, except for Malfoy, who looked furious.

"Anyway, Malfoy, for your information, I'm a girl. Not a pouf. I don't have a willy anymore. I reckon you're disappointed by this, are you? Hoping you could get some practice in, were you?" she asked, miming a blowjob.

Even Crabbe and Goyle were chuckling now. The other Slytherins were howling with laughter. Malfoy was not taking this well. His face was redder than Ron's hair, and he looked like he was going to kill something. Or some _one_.

It was perhaps a good thing that Malfoy was so angry he was rendered speechless, because Professor Hagrid came walking up then, ready to start class. Upon seeing Hagrid, Adira could've kicked herself; she'd forgotten to tell Hagrid!

"Right, everyone, right, cummon, I got a good lesson fer ya all, no dawdlin'."

The lesson turned out to be on unicorns, which was something of a departure for Hagrid. But then, the animals he'd been showing them since Buckbeak got hexed had been reflective of Hagrid's dour mood. Adira didn't know what to make of him showing them unicorns.

She did, however, have no trouble at all noticing that he was avoiding her. The emotions coming off of him made it plain to her that he was hurt to have to find out her new name and her change in gender from McGonagall. She tried all lesson to get him to talk to her, but it was hard when most of it was spent around the unicorn foal, since unicorns don't like boys for some reason. It accepted her with no problem, which was a relief to her. Even given her change, she half worried that the creature would pick up on Al's presence inside her, but it didn't.

After the bell rang, she hung back. Hagrid tried avoiding her again, but she stood right in front of his cabin's door, making that rather difficult.

"Whatta yeh want, Potter?"

Now it was her turn to feel hurt, but she supposed she deserved it.

"Sorry, _Professor,_ " she said pointedly. "But I wanted to talk with you."

Her use of his title successfully took him aback.

"I dunno if I want yeh ter talk with me an all," he said, crossing his arms.

"Please, Hagrid?"

He wilted at her pleading tone.

"Oh alrigh', go on in, we'll talk."

She nodded, and went on in, fending off the excited Fang in order to sit down at his table. She noticed Buckbeak was missing.

"So what're yeh here for, then, anyway?"

"I wanted to apologize. I really am sorry, Hagrid. It felt so bad, continuing to pretend I was a boy now that I knew the truth, and I got so caught up in wanting to get it all out there so I wouldn't have to wear that horrible mask of lies anymore, that I completely forgot to tell you ahead of time about it. You should've been the first to know after Ron and Hermione, but it completely slipped my mind until I saw you today. I'm horribly sorry. Can you forgive me my dunderheadedness?"

Hagrid softened. "Yeah, o' course I can, Adira. I know bein' a teen can be a distractin' sort o' time, an' then yeh got all this other stuff on yer mind, too, I don't blame yeh. I was just hurt I had ter hear it from McGonagall, in a piece o' parchment no less."

"I'm sorry, Hagrid," she said, hugging him. "I really am. Sirius may be my godfather, but I've known you since you got me from the Dursleys, and you're like the father I never had. I should've told you after telling Ron and Hermione."

"Yeh... yeh think o' me like a father?" Hagrid asked, awe in his voice.

"Yeah, I do. You care for me, you get angry on my behalf when I've been mistreated, you listen to me, you know when to give good advice and when to just be there for me, you went to the trouble to get me a whole book of photos of my parents, and you give me gifts on holidays and birthdays. You're the first real family I've known in my life, really. Mom and Dad... all I remember of them is from the night they died, in dementor visions."

Hagrid burst out crying. She could've felt they were tears of joy even if she hadn't been empathic. She was doing the same thing, in fact, but quieter. Telling Hagrid he was like the father she'd never had was one of those things she hadn't realized was true until she'd said it, and then when she did, it made too much sense to question. Sirius was an unknown quantity, still, but if it worked out as well with Sirius as it had with Hagrid, she was sure she'd feel like she had two dads.

As Hagrid's wails of joy turned into sniffles, he wiped his eyes and said, "Yeh've no idea how much it means ter me yeh've said that, Adira, yeh really can't. I've long thought yeh were like me own blood kin, too. And since I never knew me mum, and me dad died before I was expelled, well... I've been lonely a long time. Then you came round, and it all changed."

"I know, Hagrid. It took me until... well, until today to realize what you were to me. I'd never had anything like it, before. Didn't have anything to compare it to. But then once I said it, it all clicked into place and I knew it was true."

Hagrid beamed at her. She beamed back.

She'd spent as much time with Hagrid as she'd dared. It wasn't until he offered her lunch that she made an excuse to leave. "To be honest, Hagrid," she'd said, "as much as I love you, your cooking leaves much to be desired." He'd chuckled at her and agreed, and she went up to the school to get some lunch.

The next few weeks were fairly uneventful. Classes continued, they continued their anti-dementor lessons (in which slow progress was being made), people slowly got used to Adira's new name and pronouns, Malfoy kept trying to be horrible and the collective kept making clever comebacks that shut him up. Slytherin also narrowly defeated Ravenclaw at Quidditch, which was good for Griffindor's prospects. Quidditch practices were a lot more cheerful than they'd been, between the dementors being gone and the presence of a Firebolt on the team, Iliana going through the air so fast she could've sworn she was reaching point B before leaving point A. Wood was certain they were going to make up for the disaster that was their match with Hufflepuff.

Ginny was still avoiding them, but seemed a lot less vigilant about it than she'd been, so maybe she was sorting out her feelings, or getting over her crush on 'Harry.' Buckbeak was still recovering from Malfoy's hexes, though apparently he was getting a lot better. Zoey still hadn't worked out what revenge to hit Malfoy with.

Not much else happened of note until February 5th, when Griffindor and Ravenclaw had a Quidditch match with each other. Wood was getting more intense with practices than normal for him, because they needed to win this match and win it well to have a good chance of winning the Cup.

On the morning of the match, Iliana brought out the Firebolt for the Great Hall to see. This was significant because Wood had insisted they keep the Firebolt a secret for as long as possible, which they had. Various people admired it, and Malfoy looked like he was going to be ill, when he saw it. In fact, he came over and made an attempt at his usual bullying.

"Got plenty of special features, hasn't it?" said Malfoy, eyes glittering maliciously. "Shame it doesn't come with a parachute — in case you have another fainting fit."

Crabbe and Goyle sniggered.

"Pity you can't attach an extra arm to yours, Malfoy," said Iliana. "Then it could catch the Snitch for you."

The Gryffindor team laughed loudly. Malfoy's pale eyes narrowed, and he stalked away. They watched him rejoin the rest of the Slytherin team, who put their heads together, no doubt asking Malfoy whether Potter's broom really was a Firebolt.

Finally, it was time to go to the pitch. She grabbed their Firebolt and made her way down to the changing rooms, though she'd already changed into her uniform, so she only passed through. When she went out onto the pitch to inspect the area before play, she noted someone climbing up the steps to the stands – Sirius. She got on her Firebolt and flew up to talk to him. When she got there, Hagrid came up the stairs as well and gave Sirius a thoughtful look before sitting next to him. He looked a lot better, his hair trimmed neatly. He'd gained weight, and his face looked better, but it still hadn't lost most of the haunted look Azkaban had given him. His hair was shorter and clean, and the rest of him was clean as well, and he had gained weight, no longer looking skeletally thin. He was a little less pale, too, but not by a lot.

"Sirius! You're out of St. Mungo's?"

"What?" Sirius said, having not seen them. He looked at her and gasped. "Lily!"

"Iliana," she said. "Sorry, I guess I forgot we hadn't met yet."

"Right, I should've known. I was at the Quidditch match where you lost your other broom, so I should've recognized you. But to be honest, 12 years in Azkaban tends to damage the memory permanently. Or rather, the short term memory and the parts of the brain that remember happy thoughts. The Healers say I may never fully recover. There's going to be a lawsuit for wrongful imprisonment against the Ministry, and they're collecting evidence."

"Aye," said Hagrid. "'orrible place, Sirius. I was there only a few months at most, an' that was 'orrible enough. Can't even imagine what being there 12 years would be like."

"I'm glad we got you out of there. Both of you."

"Me too. By the way, Hagrid, do you still have my motorbike?"

"Yeah, I got it right enough. It's in storage, should be good as new still. Dumbledore set up the charms fer me. He reckoned it might come in useful down the way."

"So were you released from St. Mungo's?" she asked Sirius.

"No, not yet. I'm on a supervised day trip to see the match," he said, pointing a thumb up the stands at a St. Mungo's healer in green robes. The woman was watching Sirius like a hawk.

"Those St. Mungo's healers are worse than Madam Pomfrey," Sirius said with annoyance. "They won't let me go until they're sure I'm as healed up as I can be. But seeing as I don't have my own flat yet, and I'd rather swallow 20 pounds of doxy eggs than go back to my parents' house – which is an utter pigsty, by the way, I don't really have anywhere else to go yet."

"Miss Potter!" came Madam Hooch's voice. "We're about to start the game! Come down from there now, please!"

"Gotta go, Sirius, Hagrid. Stick around after the game a bit, will you?"

"Sure. I think I'm authorized to stay the whole day, as long as I get food from the Hogwarts kitchens."

"Cool," she said, getting on her Firebolt and flying back down to the pitch.

"It's uncanny, Hagrid, isn't it?"

"Aye, that it is. She could almos' be Lily's identical twin."

"And that Alastair, looks exactly like me when I was his age."

"Yeh, that he does. It was a mite unnerving, fer a long time there. Still gives me pause. Twelve years o' thinkin yeh were, well... old habits die hard, yeh know."

"That they do. But you're sitting next to me, so it looks like you're making progress."

"Aye. I know what 'slike, bein' falsely accused o' summat. An' I also know what Azkaban's like." He shuddered. Sirius shuddered, too.

"Still got nightmares, Hagrid? Were you there long enough for that?"

"Not so much now, but yeah, fer a few months I did, sure enough. You?"

"Of course. Probably for the rest of my life. The Healers reckon I have shell shock. Then there's this one Healer, a chap who's into Muggle medicine as well as wizard Healing, he called it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There isn't even a magical cure for it, yet. Well, if I understand the condition well enough, at least Adira and I have something in common, now." He barked once with bitter laughter.

But they had to stop talking then, because the players were in the air, and the game was starting. They wouldn't have been able to hear one another over the cheers anyway.

Lee Jordan commentated as usual, but he was so focused on the Firebolt and talking about it that it was hard to keep up with what was going on in the match. But McGonagall managed to finally get him to focus on the game.

For all Wood's talk about Cho Chang, Iliana hadn't known who he was referring to (there being a number of Asian students whose names she didn't know) until she saw the Ravenclaw Seeker on the pitch, at which point her stomach did its own pitching, and she felt very light-headed and giddy. She recognized the pretty girl from The Three Broomsticks, that day she'd learned of Sirius being their godfather. The events of that day had driven the girl from her mind, but she was back in full force now.

It wasn't very helpful for the game, though, these feelings. Every time she went for the snitch, Cho – who was tailing her because of the vast difference in speed of their brooms – kept showing up to block her. And the girl was so pretty that she was finding it hard to do anything but stop hard to avoid crashing into the girl.

"What are you doing, Iliana?" Wood yelled at her. "Show her your acceleration! Fly at her and make her chicken out!"

Trying to force herself to focus on the game and ignore how pretty Cho was, she did some difficult turns around the hoops to shake the girl off her tail, while keeping an eagle eye out for the snitch at the same time.

When she next saw the snitch, she dived after it, dives being something of a specialty of theirs; while the others didn't really like broom flying, Al was stoic enough of a person, except when it came to anger, that having his help to ground her thoughts made dives less terrifying than normal. But a bludger came flying at them from one of the Ravenclaw beaters, and the snitch got away as she avoided it.

Of course those supporting Griffindor gave a great 'ooooh' as this happened, and the Slytherins and Ravenclaws cheered. Iliana ignored that and listened to the score briefly – 80 to zero Griffindor – before going back to hunting for the snitch.

The Ravenclaws scored a few goals, starting to catch up on points a bit. Getting the snitch became more important as a result. Shortly after, the snitch caught her eye again, and she dived again. Once more, Cho blocked her, and she barely avoided crashing into the other girl.

"ILIANA! THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR GOOD MANNERS!" Wood yelled at her. "KNOCK HER OFF HER BROOM IF YOU HAVE TO!"

Cho gave Iliana a smug grin at having kept the snitch from her, but instead of annoyance, Iliana felt her insides, already soft, turn to mush. There was also an odd tingling between her legs that was utterly alien to her. She wondered suddenly if Cho had cast some kind of weakness curse on her, something that caused tingling in the skin as well. Her skin felt hot, and her breathing was too fast even taking the game into account.

Very concerned about what was happening to her body, Iliana doubled down on her efforts to focus on the game. Some quick thinking gave her a new tactic; if Cho was going to stalk her around the pitch, then she'd take advantage of that. When she next spotted the snitch, she pretended she didn't see it and dived in a different direction to make Cho try to block her before feinting and heading to the real location of the snitch. This worked for a while, but then Cho started diving for the real snitch.

She accelerated; so, many feet below, did Cho. Iliana was winning, gaining on the Snitch with every second. Then-

"Oh!" screamed Cho, pointing.

Despite herself, Iliana looked down and saw three hooded dementors. Her brain was already not working right, so she didn't think how unlikely it was, nor that she wasn't feeling any of the normal symptoms of dementors; she just pulled her wand out and shouted "EXPECTO PATRONUM!" and kept flying toward the snitch.

Something silvery-white and enormous came out, which she barely noticed. Her head still clear – feelings for Cho aside – she grabbed the snitch out of the air, ending the game.

The whistle blew, and the crowd went wild at the win. People were coming left and right to congratulate her as she landed.

"That was a hell of a Patronus," Sirius said.

"Quite right, Padfoot old friend," Lupin said from beside the Animagus.

"I can't believe those dementors didn't affect me! And where'd they come from, anyway? I thought Dumbledore had them all recalled to Azkaban?"

Sirius began laughing too hard to talk, or even breathe. Lupin grinned at Iliana.

"That would be because they weren't dementors. Take a look."

She did. In a plan that was stupid even by Malfoy's standards, he, Crabbe, and Goyle had pretended to be dementors, to try to sabotage her. McGonagall was furious at them, yelling and taking points and giving detentions, but they weren't listening because they were still trapped in their robes. The Patronus had terrified them utterly. She even thought she smelled the odor of urine coming from them. She laughed merrily at their misfortune.

"You gave Misters Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle quite the fright," Lupin said, in case she'd missed who they were.

Ron arrived soon and joined her laughter at Malfoy and his cronies.

There was to be a party in the Griffindor common room. Iliana wanted to invite Sirius and Remus, but Sirius deferred, on account of the fact that The Fat Lady would "do her nut" in his words, if she saw him again after what he'd done to her earlier in the year while trying to get Pettigrew. When she reminded him that she still wasn't repaired and rehung yet; Sirius said he didn't think he wanted to meet the mad knight temporarily guarding Griffindor, and he also wanted to give people time to get used to him not being a murderer before he popped in on a bunch of kids who'd been taught their whole lives about how evil he supposedly was. Lupin, too, deferred, though just because he'd had enough excitement for one day.

"Don't worry about us, though, Iliana. It'll give Padfoot and I some time to catch up on old times."

The party was just as loud and raucous as she'd anticipated. She walked around the room, taking congratulations from people. On her third round of the room, she spotted Hermione trying to do homework – reading a book about Muggles – in the midst of all the noise.

"Do my eyes deceive me? Is Hermione Granger so behind on her homework that she's trying to work in this noise?" she asked her bushy-haired friend.

"Yes, a bit. I'm taking more classes than you are, and it's taking a bit longer than I'd thought, but I'm managing it."

"Did you even go to the match?"

"Yes, Iliana, I did. I'm thrilled we won, but I have over 400 pages to read before Monday," she said, her voice high-pitched and frantic.

"You're not going to be able to concentrate here in the common room, surely? Maybe you should try the library, or your dorm?"

"You're right, but if I went to the library, I'd have to come back. And I'm rooming with Lavender and Padma, and they can get very silly, they keep trying to drag me into their silly girlish things, and I don't have time for that. So this is the best I can do, and you talking to me isn't helping, sorry if that's rude."

"I can feel how frazzled you are, even in all this emotional chaos, Hermione. Maybe you should drop Muggle Studies. You don't actually need it, after all, since your parents are Muggles."

"But it's fascinating learning it from a Wizard perspective!"

"So read the books in your spare time, as a hobby. Lupin reads History and Anthropology books in his spare time."

"I can't! What if I decide to go into the Ministry as a Muggle Liason? I need O.W.L.'s and N.E.W.T.'s in Muggle Studies to do that!"

"In all honesty, Hermione, Mr. Weasley works with Muggles all the time, and he once asked me what the function of a rubber duck is, so the bar can't be very high. You were raised by Muggles, you could ace the tests without studying! Hell, you could _write_ the tests! _I_ could write the tests! And they'd probably be a lot better than the current tests. Also, I read somewhere that you can take tests for subjects you haven't been taking classes for."

Hermione sighed heavily and leaned back in her chair, looking very much like she wanted to scream at Iliana. But then she grabbed the book and slammed it shut, and began to cry. Iliana just sat there with her, not saying or doing anything but waiting and being there for her friend.

When Hermione finally began to compose herself, Iliana spoke at last.

"If you're really determined to keep taking Muggle Studies, you can study in my room. I'm the only body there, so it should be quiet."

"Thanks for the offer, Iliana, but you're right. I bit off more than I can chew this year. I've known it for months, but I have such a terror of academic failure that I kept it up." She sighed again. "I'm going to drop Muggle Studies. And Divination, too, I think. A more useless subject I've never seen, at least the way she teaches it. If I drop those two, I know for sure I can manage the rest. And I can..." she trailed off, clutching her hand to her chest, as though grabbing something under her robes.

"Yes, that's what I'm going to do, Iliana. Thanks for helping me realize I need to do this."

"You're welcome."

"Well, if I'm doing that, I can move on to my Potions homework. Is that offer of studying in your room still valid?"

"Of course it is. Come on, let me help you take your things up."

"I'll take the Muggle Studies and Divination stuff back up to my room first."

Iliana waited for her friend to come back from her room before grabbing the girl's remaining things and going up to the room with her. She left Hermione there for a few minutes to go get them both some snacks and drinks from the party, so they could refuel while they worked. Iliana worked on DADA homework while Hermione worked on her Potions.

"You don't have to leave the party on my account, Iliana."

"I may go back later. But I could use a little quiet."

When they were done with their homework, they lay back and pondered what punishment to get Malfoy with for Buckbeak. They were still pondering when Hermione left to go to bed. Before going to bed themselves, Zoey came up with the perfect plan, and grinned maliciously. But they couldn't do it yet. No, they would have to wait.

It took a few days to find an opportunity to strike on their plan, but coming back from the owlery on Wednesday, where they'd been sending a letter to Sirius before Lupin's anti-dementor lessons, they found one. Malfoy was coming up the other way, they could hear him talking to either Crabbe or Goyle, telling them to go on back to dinner if they were still hungry, he hadn't asked them to tag along.

Shifting into Zoey's form, she listened and heard the brute leaving, and Malfoy coming back upstairs. She ducked into a secret alcove they'd once found by accident, which apparently was activated by pounding the wall with a fist three times in succession. Doing this did not make the wall move or anything, it instead made the wall permeable, a bit like Platform 9 and 3/4ths. What was better, anyone inside could see out, but nobody could see in. So she waited there for Malfoy to come up the steps, a letter in his hands.

As he passed, she stunned him with their wand and dragged him into the alcove, keeping the door permeable by keeping one foot inside it while she grabbed him. Once they were both inside, she tied him up with ropes from their wand, gave him the Full Body Bind for good measure, and then stuck him to the ceiling with a Sticking Charm, resisting the temptation to attempt a Permanent Sticking Charm, just barely.

Instead, she set a few more charms on him, which would have very specific results, and when she was satisfied, she left the alcove and headed off to their lessons, which they were still going to because – one incident aside – they still couldn't reliably do the charm. She quite surprised Lupin by being the one to show up, and to stay showed up, but he accepted it without much fuss. She turned out to be able to produce white mist on the first try, and every subsequent try.

It was hard, later, to resist snickering to herself every time she thought of what she'd done. She only wished she could witness the results when the Sticking Charm wore off around midnight, the ropes cushioning Malfoy's fall before dissolving to free him. He would think he simply had to sneak back down to the dungeons without getting caught, but then as soon as he left the alcove, the Wailing Charm would activate, filling the nearby bits of the school with a piercing shrieking noise that was bound to attract Filch and/or any teachers or Prefects that might be in the area. Not knowing how to activate the alcove – she hoped – he would panic and run. But whether he went upstairs to the owlery, or down to where he needed to go to escape, he was sure to be caught. She'd be very astonished if he managed to get back without getting caught, when he would be shrieking like a banshee the whole way.

Sure enough, at breakfast the next morning, it was the talk of the school that Slytherin had lost 50 points overnight, and that Malfoy was to blame. Filch had caught him out of bounds at one in the morning, and taken him to Professor McGonagall, who had docked him points and taken him to Snape to be given a detention. The word on the Hogwarts grapevine was that Snape would be having him scrub something particularly stubborn and nasty off the walls of the potions lab that had exploded in an N.E.W.T. level class, something experimental that was dissolving the stone, and he'd be cleaning it without magic, since magic had already failed to clean up the strange mess.

The only downside was that Snape, as he passed them in the hall, clearly suspected them of having been responsible for Malfoy's predicament. Zoey made sure to fill their brain with some especially annoying songs whenever Snape was nearby, so that if he _was_ reading their mind, he'd only hear stuff like 'infinity bottles of beer on the wall.'

The universe must've had a sense of humor, though. Because on the morning of their February Hogsmeade Saturday, Iliana woke up feeling like shit. And when she pulled the covers aside, she screamed. There was blood _everywhere_. And it was emanating from...

She immediately felt like an idiot for screaming, especially since there was a pounding on the door, and Ron asking if she needed help. Her period, _of course._ She _had_ been warned by both Snape and Madam Pomfrey to expect this, and it seemed to have come at last.

"I'm fine, Ron. It's... it's just that time of the month, apparently."

"Oh," Ron said through the door, sounding uncomfortable.

"Do you, er... need me to help you with anything?" he asked, sounding like he was desperately hoping the answer would be 'no.'

"No, I have what I need here. I was warned this would happen. It just came as a shock, all this blood, for the first time."

"Too much information, Iliana. Should I fetch Hermione?"

She blinked. That was a good idea; Hermione had experience with this sort of thing already.

"Yeah, sure. If you can find her. Boys can't go up the stairs to the girls' dormitory."

"Right, I'll try my best," Ron said. She heard him leave down the hall.

She got out of bed and tried to clean the sheets with magic. But she didn't know how to get blood out of them, so she gave up and concentrated on cleaning herself up. By the time Hermione came in, she was out of the shower, but still in her towel. When her friend came in, she locked the door.

"Ah, so it's happened finally," Hermione said, looking at the sheets.

"Yes. And I still feel horrible. Also, I think I might need to clean up again."

"Here, let me help you. See, you take this bit and this, and..."

Iliana listened attentively to Hermione's lesson in the realities of being the owner of a working uterus. Which potions to take, what they did, how often; which pads to use, and how to use them. Even a spell for completely removing blood from her panties, which was something Muggle women didn't have.

"You could probably use it on the sheets, too, but you can just chuck the sheets down the laundry chutes. Someone must come around and put new sheets on when we're out; I've never seen them at it, but it gets done. Still, no sense keeping bloody sheets on the bed. You _have_ noticed, I hope, that we never have to clean our dorms? Sure, they don't touch personal posessions, but... well never mind. Here, wrap them like this and put them with a dirty robe to hide the evidence if that helps. Though with Ron's behavior and your scream earlier, well... never mind that, too. Girls won't make any issue of it, and boys would rather have their eyeballs hexed inside out than talk about it, so never mind."

So, with her friend's help, Iliana got rid of the evidence and got herself fully presentable and ready for the day, thankful for the magical pads that could be kept on all day long, catching everything, and leaving no odor behind. She was also thankful for the potions. Her abdomen had felt like it was being tortured, but now it was much better. Nevertheless, she still felt ill, and at breakfast she found it hard to eat much.

"What's the plan today, Iliana?" Ron asked her, as though nothing unusual had happened. Only his plainly forced smile gave his feelings away.

"Sirius was allowed another day trip by the Healers, so I'm going to meet with him today. Do you two want to come, too?"

She looked especially at Hermione, silently communicating that she wanted her around just in case.

"Yeah, sure. Sounds cool. Sirius is awesome."

"Good."

"Hey, check out Malfoy," Ron said, changing the subject.

Iliana looked at Malfoy. He looked almost as miserable as she felt. When he looked up, he glared at her. Clearly Malfoy suspected them of causing his detention and points the other day. Iliana just stared blankly at him, too out of sorts herself to do anything else.

She heard Seamus laugh. "Yeah, I heard Malfoy was scrubbing that stuff off the walls until well after midnight. So that's two nights in a row he hasn't slept well."

As she continued to stare blankly back at Malfoy, his stare turned into one that promised revenge, and soon. She'd have to be on the lookout. If he _did_ do something to her, she wondered if Zoey could turn him into a girl, so he'd have to go through the Hell she was currently experiencing; a Hell that, while muted, still felt wretched.

"Oh hey," Iliana said, feeling the need to change the subject, "I forgot to ask before, did you tell McGonagall you're quitting Muggle Studies and Divination?"

"What?" Exclaimed Ron. "Hermione is quitting two classes? _Hermione_?"

"Yes, Ron," Hermione answered testily. "Iliana finally convinced me that I had bitten off more than I could chew. I was running myself ragged on that schedule, but I should be able to manage fine now. And yes, Iliana, I told her last Sunday."

"Are you gonna tell us how you were getting to your classes before?"

She paused to think for a moment. Coming to a decision, she nodded.

"Yes. I suspect I only had to keep it a secret so others wouldn't steal it and abuse it. But since I've given it up now, I can tell you. No more danger of it being misused, now."

"Abuse _what_?" Ron asked.

"I was given a time-turner."

"A what, now?"

"A device kept at the ministry that let me go back and redo hours. Back... in time."

Iliana choked on her eggs and fell over, turning into Alastair on the way down. When he climbed back up, able to breathe, he goggled at her.

"I was just kidding when I suggested a time machine!"

"Keep your voice down, Al," she said unnecessarily, since his voice had been hoarse and quiet from choking. "I'm not entirely sure it was a good idea to tell you."

"You had a bloody time machine and you _gave it up_? With Moldy Voldy still out there? He could come back, and we could use the time machine to go back and prevent it!"

"That is exactly the kind of attitude that makes me think I shouldn't have told you. Meddling with time is very dangerous. McGonagall-"

"If time travel is so dangerous, why'd they let you do it to attend classes? Gods, that has got to be the geekiest thing ever. 'I'm Hermione Granger, I got given a time machine and I used it to take more classes because I want my picture to be in the dictionary next to the word "swot".'"

Hermione glared at him. "For your information, Alastair Potter, Professor McGonagall had to write all sorts of letters to the ministry swearing I was a model student and wouldn't use it for anything but going to classes."

"God, knowing you, you probably did. Man, if I had a time machine, I'd go back an hour and give myself a-"

" _Please_ do not finish that sentence," Hermione begged of him.

He smirked at her. "You know me too well, 'mione."

"Yes, I do," she said sourly, focusing on her breakfast.

"So, er, Al... how, uh... how do you feel? You know, with..."

"Oh me? I feel great. Guess since I don't have a uterus, I'm not affected. Maybe I'll just hang around whenever the girls get their monthlies so they don't have to suffer."

Ron chuckled. "From what I've heard, today's gonna be great. Al and Sirius in the same room together is a hoot, I've heard tell."

"A regular hoot _nanny_ , no less," Al replied before digging heartily into his bangers.

"Hogsmeade won't know what hit it."

"Too right. Me and Sirius might even give Fred and George a run for their money."

"Oh really?" said one of the twins, having overheard him talking. "Whadda ya think, George? Go down with this lot to meet the infamous Sirius Black?"

"I wouldn't miss it for the world, Fred. I just wonder what kind of protective gear we should take, to prevent injury and loss of limb. You know, from the epic shenanigans that are bound to ensue."

"Should we sell ringside tickets, d'ya reckon?"

"On such short notice? Nah, maybe later. Got to preview the show, vet it for suitability with audiences."

"Of course, of course. Silly me, why didn't I think of that?"

"Because I'm the clever one, of course."

"Too true, too true. Whereas I got the devilishly good looks."

The twins laughed and went back to their food. Hermione rolled her eyes at them, while Al barked with laughter before going back to his own food.

On their way down to the village later, Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle caught the three of them 'alone.'

"Oh look, it's the Weasel, the Mudblood, and the freakshow."

"Behave yourself, Malfoy," Al warned, "or Zoey will hide you somewhere nobody will ever find you."

"So you _did_ attack me that night, and stick me to the ceiling! I knew it!"

"Go ahead and think what you will. But I warn you to behave, or I'll have Zoey transfigure your cock up your own arse. You know, right next to your head."

Crabbe and Goyle cracked their knuckles menacingly.

"You two babboons don't scare me. I've faced Voldemort, _twice_ , and survived. I could transfigure your faces to each other's arses before you could even get a shot off. So run along and forget about your revenge. Because if we did have something to do with your predicament the other day, Malfoy, it would've been because of what you did to Hagrid's hippogriff, Buckbeak. Not just some random prank, like I'm sure you think. Hypothetically speaking, of course."

"Of course. And hypothetically speaking, Potter, if I did have plans to get you back, it bloody well wouldn't be here in broad daylight where anyone could come along and see. I'd just think it would be fun, to put you on your guard, make you squirm before it happened."

Al put his hands on his knees and bent down like he was talking condescendingly to a small child. "And if I was the weest bit fwightened of big scawy Swythewins, Malfoy, I might be worried. But Crabbe and Goyle are practically squibs, relying on their muscles and bulk to intimidate people, and they have the collective intelligence of half a flobberworm. Whereas you're just a small, blond, sniveling git hiding behind big words, your goons, and your father. You think the world is your oyster, and the first person to be unimpressed by your entitled attitude is who you've chosen to be your enemy, because you can't stand it when you're not the center of the universe. Without your money, Malfoy, you're nothing. If your daddy's fortune somehow vanished, like if he gambled it away or spent it all on whores and booze, your name would mean nothing. You pick on Ron and his family because I'm betting that your boggart would be you and your parents dressed in rags, begging on the streets to survive."

Malfoy exploded in rage, and Al just barely dodged the hex, sending his own back. Crabbe and Goyle surged forward to engage Ron and Hermione, but Al tripped them with a trip jinx and sent three stunners, hitting all three Slytherins. When the dust settled, figuratively speaking, he rolled them to the side of the path, tied them up with ropes from his wand, Disillusioned them, and put a Full Body Bind on them.

Hermione wrung her hands all the time, but didn't stop him. She continued wringing her hands on the way down to the village, too.

"Listen, Hermione, don't worry about it. The spells will wear off before dinner. They'll miss their whole Hogsmeade day, but that'll serve them right for attacking us.

"You do realize they're just going to be even more angry now, right?"

"Let them be. I don't care. They're bullies, and I can't stand bullies."

"You're being a bit of a bully yourself, you know."

"Nonsense. I never attack them first. They always bring it about themselves."

"You goaded them into attacking, Al. How is that not bullying?"

Al looked a bit uncomfortable. "Yeah, well, they goaded me into goading them. If they just knew how to stop while they're behind, I'd leave them be. But they've always got to have the last word."

"Something you have in common with them, Al."

More might've been said, but they'd gotten to The Three Broomsticks, and it was time to meet Sirius.

End note: Yes, I know the Harry Potter Lexicon says lessons with Lupin were at 8 pm, but in this one they're at 7. It gives them an extra hour.

Also, I don't care for the movies past the second one, but I couldn't think of a good book reference for Mr. Weasley's incompetence with Muggle stuff, so please forgive me that one movie reference.

End note 2: Ending the chapter here because it's already almost 30 pages long, and that's without the spaces between paragraphs.


	19. Home

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 19"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Nineteen:** **Home**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. It's been frustrating me, too, but some things are just too perfect already to change. Which, fair warning, includes most of the conversation Fudge, Hagrid, Flitwick, and McGonagall have in The Three Broomsticks.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Harry/Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__

 _ _***__ _FAYANORA_ _ _***__

Quite apart from anything else that day, even the pleasure of putting Malfoy and his cronies in their place, was the look of resigned horror on Madam Rosmerta's face when she saw both Al and Sirius together in her bar, like she'd been afraid this would eventually happen, and had been hoping it would be a few more years before that day came.

"Alastair Potter and S-Sirius Black, in the same room together. Blimey, Sirius, I've only started getting used to the idea of you having been innocent this whole time, and you drop _this_ on me?"

Sirius and Al both barked with laughter, slightly out of synch with one another.

"Sorry, Rosmerta, but I didn't plan this."

"Nor did I," Al said. "We were gonna have Iliana come today, but she, er... wasn't feeling well."

Sirius looked at Al shrewdly. So did Rosmerta. But neither commented.

"What would you two troublemakers like to drink?"

"I'd k—er, I'd like a firewhiskey," Sirius said.

"Same for me," Al said, putting his feet on the table. The two adults glowered at him. "What?"

"You're too young, pup," Sirius said.

Al sighed. "Fine. I'll have a butterbeer."

"Good. And you two?" she asked Ron and Hermione.

"Two butterbeers," Hermione said.

"Be back soon with your drinks," Rosmerta said. "Do try to not demolish the bar before then."

"You wound me, Madam," Al answered melodramatically. "You wound me to my very core."

She snorted, and left to get their drinks. Al eyed her backside appreciatively. Then he nudged Sirius, who was also leaning back with one foot on the table, and said, "You and her ever, you know...?"

Sirius nearly fell over, he laughed so hard. "Don't I wish. But she was always immune to my charms. Don't think I've ever seen her take to anyone, to be honest. But then, I've been a bit out of touch for a while, so who knows?"

The door opened, and McGonagall and Hagrid walked in. McGonagall looked stricken when she spotted Al and Sirius, as though she'd had nightmares about this.

"Minerva, are you feeling well?" Sirius asked her.

"To be honest, Sirius, I'm not. Ever since Madam Pomfrey told me about the first time you two met, I've been dreading it happening again."

"Seems to be a theme," Al commented. "I can't for the life of me think why, though," he said, grinning.

"Blimey, I knew yeh looked like 'im, Al, but seein the two o' yeh together like this... blimey."

"Yeah, it's one of life's little mysteries. I'm still not entirely convinced Sirius isn't somehow a literal second father."

Sirius really _did_ fall off his chair that time, cursing like a sailor as he scrambled to get back up while everyone laughed at him. Red in the face and ears, he righted his chair and sat normally on it before speaking.

"There'll be none of that talk, Alastair. Lily was cool, but she wasn't _that_ cool, and even if she was, it's quite impossible. You heard Madam Pomfrey."

Al shrugged.

Rosmerta came over then with their drinks, and got the two new orders at the same time, going back to the bar. When she'd left, McGonagall turned to Al and looked sternly down her nose at him.

"By the way, Mr. Potter. I found something rather unusual on my way down here today. Or rather, Hagrid did. His foot hit something invisible. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"

Al shrugged. "No, Professor McGonagall. Could it have been a demiguise?"

"No, Mr. Potter, I think not, since demiguises are native to the far east. Besides which, it was three Slytherins, trussed up and Disillusioned and left at the side of the path. Misters Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle to be specific."

Sirius nearly choked on his firewhiskey, laughing. Their letters to him had told him all about the three Slytherins.

"Sounds like they got themselves into quite a predicament. Good thing you found them, Professor. I wouldn't want them to get hurt."

"In point of fact, Mr. Potter, that was a rhetorical question. I know full well you're responsible. I just wanted to know if there were any extenuating circumstances before I meted out punishment. Which I will be doing regardless of your answer, but I may be predisposed toward leniency if the situation calls for it."

"Well, we were just walking along when the three of them ambushed us to have a little chat with us. Malfoy seemed to think I'd done something to him, and I couldn't convince him otherwise. Our argument may have gotten a little heated. But he and his goons attacked first."

"I see. Well, I shall be punishing them for attacking first, but you will attend detention tomorrow night at 7 o'clock; come to my office then. Also, I will be taking 15 points from Griffindor for what you did to them."

Al arranged his face into a passable semblance of remorse. "Of course, Professor. I'll be there."

"Yes. _You_ will indeed be there. Not Zoey, not Adira, not Iliana, nor Tier. _You._ "

"Ten-four, Professor."

She blinked at him, confused.

Hermione sighed. "That's something Muggle lorry drivers and walkie-talkie users say to mean that they've heard you and understand."

"Oh. Good. Now I'm going to go over there and enjoy my drink. See you later, Mr. Potter. And do try to avoid further trouble."

"Ten-four, Professor," he said again, saluting.

As she and Hagrid left their table, they heard snickering from the table behind them. They turned to look, and saw the Weasley twins.

"That was brilliant, mate!"

"Lovely! And you only lost 15 points!"

"Yeah, she must've thought they deserved what you did, for waylaying you."

"What was it you did to him, pup?" Sirius asked him.

Al grinned, and started to tell them all, in detail, what Zoey had done to Malfoy, careful to couch it in rhetorical terms, in case any of the teachers could hear him. When he finished, he leaned back and smirked while everyone but Hermione laughed themselves silly. Hermione just rolled her eyes and sighed.

"Honestly, you are just impossible," she told him.

"Not impossible. Just highly improbable."

When their drinks were finished, Al and Sirius got up and left the main group to go off and do their own thing together. They went to Honeydukes, where Sirius got a generous amount of chocolate for Al and company, as well as some for himself. Then they spent a lot of time in Zonko's, getting various joke supplies and laughing it up.

It wasn't until a running student accidentally splashed mud all over Sirius's robes that they noticed he had a wand, when he took it out to clean himself off.

"You got a new wand?"

"What? Oh, no. It's my original wand. Got it back after I got pardoned. Fudge himself came to St. Mungo's to give it to me."

"Your original wand? But when Hagrid got expelled, they broke his."

"Well yes, he was expelled. Can't have unqualified wizards using magic. But prisoners just have their wands confiscated."

"Oh, okay. Hey, I just thought something. Since Hagrid's name got cleared, is he going to be trained up and given a new wand?"

"Hmm... I don't know. Sounds like something to take up with Hagrid. Or Dumbledore. Or both."

"Well if so, he'll have to get a new one. He's been using his old wand, which is an umbrella now, and it's a miracle it works at all. After Ron's wand broke down in the Chamber of Secrets, he had to get a new one. Of course, his had been among the walking dead for some time before that, so maybe it's different with Hagrid's."

"Possibly. Dumbledore or Ollivander would know for sure."

They went back to the Three Broomsticks and sat down together to talk.

"So, how are you, you mangy mutt?" Al teased.

"Oh, on the mend. Healers keep saying I should be well enough to be released by Easter. I hope so. Getting stir crazy in that hospital. At least they keep bringing me plenty to read, and I get the occasional day trips. This one, you may have noticed, is unsupervised. But they have a tracking spell on me so they can fetch me up when they want to.

"Anyway, let's see, what else? Ah yes, I've been allowed to talk with the goblins, and I've got access to the Black family vault again; I haven't actually been in there, yet, but I've been getting money again. I've been trying to see if I can get a flat for us by the time I'm released from St. Mungo's. The Healers haven't been thrilled about it, but they've been letting me carry on anyway. I've got a few places to look at, which means more day trips. Been trying to arrange things so I can check multiple places out on the same days, because until they let me go, the number of day trips they let me have is limited. But I should have a place squared away soon. Which reminds me, I'll have to talk with Dumbledore about letting you come with me to look at places."

"What? Why?"

"If we're both going to be living there, we should both like the place we pick, right?"

"Oh, yeah. Good point. Well, as long as it isn't 4 Privet Drive in Surry, and as long as I have my own room, I don't care about anything else."

"Yeah, but don't settle for shit when you can get gold, okay? I only wish we could go to my old flat, the one my uncle helped me pay for, before Azkaban, but my possessions were seized when I was thrown in there, and the old flat has different people in it now. I know, I checked."

"Well it sounds like fun. I've never lived in a flat before. Never even been in one. The Dursleys own their own house, and so do the Weasleys."

"If you're getting your ideas about flats from television, pup, don't. Wizard flats are different. They look like normal Muggle ones on the outside, but inside they're as huge as one can afford. The one my uncle got me was only a little smaller than my parents' house, on the inside.

"Anyway, after we pick a place, I'll have to have goblins and some trusted friends in to set up the wards. I want to keep you as safe as possible, like I should have been able to do before."

He paused, scowling.

"Sirius?"

"Gods, I was such an _idiot_. I should have gone straight to Dumbledore and explained the truth. He can always tell when someone's telling the truth or not. Should've gone to Dumbledore, rather than trying to murder the traitorous rat myself. Seeing the house blown up like that, two of my best friends dead, and a third was a traitor... I must've lost my mind. Temporary insanity."

"Eh, don't dwell on the past. What's done is done."

"Good advice, pup."

Sirius tousled Al's hair playfully. Then he looked at Al in a strange sort of wistful way.

"Knut for your thoughts?"

"Oh. It's just... I suppose Adira's in there, right? Is she awake? Is she listening?"

"Hanging onto your every word. Offering occasional comments, suggestions for things to say."

"Good, good. I just... this whole thing is very odd. I know I've been hiding my confusion well, but, well... yeah. Still trying to make sense of this whole thing."

"You and us both. But at least you don't avoid talking to us, and then talk about us behind our back, like most of the students and some of the teachers do. At least, I hope you don't."

Sirius hugged him. "Nah. It's unusual, for sure, but I love you, all of you. Though I don't think I've met everyone yet. Let's see, I met Adira, Iliana, and you. Who does that leave?"

"Zoey and Tier."

"Ah yes, the little mischievous pixie and the strong, silent one."

Al chuckled. "Yeah, pretty much. Do you want to meet Zoey now?"

"Only if it's okay with you lot."

Al nodded. "See you later, Padfoot!"

Before Sirius's eyes, Al shrunk down to Zoey.

"Striking eyes," Sirius said. "Looks like one is Lily's, the other is... blue?"

Zoey nodded. "Just like Al's."

"Blue, green, and hazel, all in one body, eh?"

She shrugged. "I guess."

"So I hear you're a dab hand at transfiguration."

"I'm a natural. Tier is a natural at transfiguring the body, I'm a natural at transfiguring other stuff. I don't even need a wand!"

"Really? Can I see? That's a heck of a thing to claim, I'm gonna need proof."

"Sure," she said, grabbing her used butterbeer bottle and concentrating on it, both her empty hands on the table, in plain view. And before his eyes, the bottle morphed into a small bird, which hopped around the table and twittered.

"Amazing!"

"Yeah, I guess so," she said shyly. "I don't do so well with a wand, though. On transfiguration, I mean. I'm just as good as the others with most spells, but the wand kinda holds me back when doing transfiguration."

Sirius let the little bird hop onto his finger, admiring the realism. It was indistinguishable from a real bird.

"My mood seems to affect it, too. In a bad mood, trying that, it would look like a lump of melted glass, and not a bird. Oh, and by the way, don't touch it too hard, it might break."

"Break?"

"Like glass. I may be a prodigy at transfiguration, but I've still got a lot of learning left to do. And I couldn't do that at all with a wand."

Sure enough, when the bird hopped down off his hand, its legs broke under it like colored glass, and it started to panic, twittering like mad. Zoey, looking sadly at it, concentrated on it, and turned it back into a bottle.

"Oh, by the way," she said, changing the subject, "I should show you Aqua!"

"Aqua?"

 _'Come on out, Aqua,'_ she hissed in Parseltongue.

From out of the sleeve of her robes came a very annoyed looking garden snake.

 _'You know, it is very hard to sleep when you keep changing back and forth.'_

 _'Sorry, Aqua.'_

 _'You are forgiven, human. Now, what did you call me for?'_

"Bloody Hell," Sirius said in wonder. "So Dumbledore wasn't lying, you really _are_ a Parselmouth."

"Yup. I was speaking it when Dumbledore overheard, and told me the significance. We tried to keep it a secret, but that didn't work out so well."

 _'Well, human? Are you going to answer me?'_

 _'Sorry. This is my godfather, Sirius Black.'_

The snake turned to Sirius and flicked its tongue out at him.

 _'He does not look black to me. More of a whitish color to me. Except for his fur; that is black.'_

She giggled. Sirius raised an eyebrow.

 _'It's not his color, it's his name.'_

 _'His name is Serious Black?'_

 _'No, not Serious. Sirius, the dog star. The north star.'_

 _'He smells like both a human and a dog.'_

 _'He's an animagus. He can turn into a dog.'_

 _'Fitting name for him, then.'_

She giggled again.

"What's it saying?"

"She's saying... well, I told her your name, and she thought I was describing you as serious and colored black. Then I told her you're named after the dog star, and told her about your animagus form. She said it was a fitting name for you."

"Yeah. I've long wondered about that. I suspect the universe has a sense of humor. After all, Moony's given name and surname both mean 'wolf.'"

"Wolf Wolf?"

"Yeah."

She giggled again.

There was a silence for a bit, while Zoey looked thoughtfully at Sirius. He looked back at her curiously.

"Sirius?"

"Yes, Zoey?"

"Would you give me a piggy back ride?"

Sirius chuckled at this. "Sure thing, moppet. Where should we go?"

"You could take me down to the Shrieking Shack."

"Alright, then."

The two of them went outside then, and once outside, Sirius lifted Zoey up and set her down on his shoulders. She held onto his head and giggled as he started down to the Shrieking Shack.

"Lucky thing I've been getting stronger, with the physical therapy St. Mungo's has been putting me through. I doubt I'd have been able to do this around Christmas time."

"So high!"

Sirius laughed again, thoroughly enjoying this as much as Zoey was.

"This is amazing, Sirius! I've never had a piggy back ride before!"

"Oh, you have. You just don't remember. Or, Adira has, rather. Back before... well... your mum and dad gave you piggy back rides. I may have done so, too."

"Yeah, but I don't remember those."

On Monday morning, something else they'd forgotten to do came to mind, and – hoping it wasn't too late – Adira wrote a letter to Mrs. Weasley in which she came out as trans.

Dear Mrs. Weasley,

I meant to do this sooner, and then got distracted and forgot. I can only hope that you get this before you hear it from other sources. I don't know how much opportunity you will have to use this information, for I will be spending the summers with my godfather, Sirius Black, from now on. That is, once he gets a flat chosen, and gets out of St. Mungo's.

Anyway, I've veered off course. I have come to a realization about myself over the last year, something that was hinted at to me around Christmas of my first year in Hogwarts, that I need to tell you. And it never gets easier, each person I tell, but here goes: I am actually a girl, in mind and spirit. I mean "Harry," not Iliana or Zoey. I thought I was a boy, since that's what I was always told, but I'm actually a girl. I will be looking into changing my name legally over the summer, to my new name: Adira Lily Jamie Potter. Please do not use my old name or pronouns, okay? But if you make mistakes, I won't bite your head off, so no worries there.

Well even with staying with Sirius, I hope to visit you all at the Burrow at least once, maybe on my birthday.

I also thank you for being understanding about Al's previous anger, moot as it may be now. I was very worried he'd damaged our relationship with his letter. So again, thank you.

Sincerely,

Adira Potter

Satisfied with the letter, she put it in the envelope and went out the portrait hole to go to the owlery. When she closed the portrait, she noticed the Fat Lady was back.

"Oh good, you're back!"

"Yes. No thanks to your godfather," she said testily.

"Er, yeah. He was a bit mad, obsessed with getting at Pettigrew. He wasn't really thinking clearly."

"You tell him I expect a formal apology from him, and he's to call ahead first. I want some extra security around when he comes to apologize, because I still don't trust him."

"I'll let him know, ma'am."

"Good."

Adira nodded and left. Wary of running into Malfoy, she made sure to keep her eyes peeled, and even checked carefully inside the alcove Zoey had stowed Malfoy in, in case he'd worked its secret out. But there was nobody in there, so she continued on up to the owlery, still alert.

Luckily, nobody else was there, so she tied her letter to Hedwig and sent the snowy owl off to the Weasleys, after giving her some owl treats. Then she warily headed back downstairs, and on to breakfast.

On her way to Potions later in the day, she was glad to have been free of Malfoy's revenge so far, but she half hoped he'd strike soon to get it over with. Hermione and Ron looked at her curiously, but she didn't explain her worries.

When the three of them arrived at Potions class, they were early. They were also faced with the Slytherins. Malfoy and his cronies were looking especially horrible today, wearing malicious expressions as they talked quietly.

"Speak of the devil," Malfoy said when they approached. "Here's the _it_ now. I wonder what it thinks it's doing here, polluting our air with its freakish disease."

The Slytherins laughed. Adira tried to ignore him.

"Bad enough it's an attention-seeking nutter pretending to be a whole load of different people, but now it thinks its a girl. Mark my words, the one that looks like Black will probably be asking us to call it Miss Pouf by Easter."

Ron balled his fists and looked to Adira questioningly. Adira, despite being furious herself, ever so slightly shook her head 'no.'

 _Al? Are you in there? I could use some clever comebacks._

Al was in there, alright. She felt an answering fury from him. But he was too incensed to speak. The way Malfoy was using the word 'it' was seriously pissing him off.

"Don't be rude, Draco," said an unfamiliar voice from among the Slytherins. Everyone who had been laughing stared in shock at the source, a black boy Adira recognized as Blaise Zabini. Blaise was presently staring down his nose at Malfoy.

Recovering his wits, Malfoy turned red with anger. "What are you _doing_ , Zabini?"

"What I'm doing, _Malfoy_ ," Blaise said, "is choosing to disregard the usual Slytherin unity to call you out for behaving in a disgusting manner."

This shocked everyone in the vicinity, especially Adira. Malfoy was gaping at him like a fish. Crabbe and Goyle recovered first, and cracked their knuckles threateningly. Blaise, however, ignored them and stepped toward Adira.

"Potter," he said, inclining his head.

"Zabini."

"Let me just make one thing clear: I don't like you, Potter, and I don't agree with you on a lot of things. I also don't know what to make of this whole... being other people business. Seems very weird to me, at least. That said, I just wanted you to know not all Slytherins are going to be horrible about your gender, like Malfoy. I support you in that much. And everyone else should, as well," he finished, giving Malfoy a haughty look, before turning back to Adira.

Zabini held out a hand for Adira. Stunned, she took it and they shook hands.

"Thank you, Zabini."

"You are welcome, Potter."

They stopped shaking hands, and Blaise went back to his previous place, though about a third of the other Slytherins moved away from him.

Malfoy looked like he was going to say something, but then Snape appeared, by opening the door.

"Mr. Malfoy," Snape said coldly. "I have just heard your entire conversation through the door. And as amusing as it normally is when you taunt Miss Potter, your behavior in this case may be hurtful to other students who are also transgender, but are not open about it, which may or may not include members of your own House, a consideration that plainly did not cross your mind. So you will serve a detention with me later, Mr. Malfoy. You will stay after class to find out when and where it is. And if I ever hear you belittle someone's gender again, it will be a week's worth of detentions, am I understood? Good. Now I suggest you go take your seat. ALL of you!"

Everyone jumped, and rushed to get through the door as soon as possible.

"Now, the potion we will be doing today..." she heard Snape say before she found it too hard to focus.

 _That was... odd. Zabini and Snape both being so..._

 _ **I know,**_ Al answered. _**Too weird for words. I wonder if Zabini is trans? Or knows someone who is?**_

 _Doesn't need to, necessarily, to be a good ally._

"Miss Potter!"

"What? Sorry, Sir."

"Please pay attention, Miss Potter. This potion is very tricky, and despite the fact that you – or one of you, anyway – have proven to be better than average in this subject, you will need to pay very close attention to avoid a cauldron explosion today. I will not tolerate repeating myself today, so I will be handing out detentions to any student who needs to be told a _second_ time to pay attention and concentrate only on their work. Understood?"

Adira nodded vigorously. So did everyone else, when Snape's gaze panned in their directions.

"Good. Now, moving on..."

"That was weird! First Zabini, then Snape!" Ron exclaimed on their way out of class.

"Yeah. And I think he actually complimented me on my Potions skills, in his own way. Or rather, Iliana's skills."

"Did he?"

"Yeah, he mentioned we're 'better than average' at Potions. Which, coming from Snape, is high praise indeed."

"Blimey."

"You know... it's only been a month since the whole school got told about me being Adira, but I've already noticed Snape has seemed to hate me a little less since then. The first time I showed up as Adira in his class, I could swear he almost _smirked_ at me. That was the day he started being more lenient with me than before. I mean, he's still a hard-ass, but he doesn't seem to be hunting for excuses to pick on me in class anymore."

"Weird. I wonder what that's about?"

"Yeah, me too. I mean, his attitude toward Iliana I get, because he fancied my mom and she's a painful reminder of Lily's death to him. I understood that something similar was going on with me as Harry, because I have Lily's eyes and look like my dad, even as a girl. And he hates Alastair because he hates Sirius. But now, I don't know."

"Didn't he hate your dad, too?"

"Yeah, he does."

"Hmm... maybe the fact that James's son is now a girl amuses him?"

Adira thought about that. "Yeah, that sounds possible. A little bigoted of him, but that's Snape for you."

After that, the days went by in a fairly regular fashion. They went to classes, they practiced Quidditch, they did homework, and they continued working on the Patronus Charm. Ginny slowly warmed back up to them, talking with Iliana and Al, though still unable to speak with Adira. Adira reached out more to Luna and Neville.

She got a letter back from Mrs. Weasley. It wasn't very long, and didn't address her previous letter's contents directly, just asking after her well being and mood, as well as sharing some news of the family. The only sign that Mrs. Weasley had gotten the previous letter was that the letter was addressed to Adira by her new name. This made Adira smile.

As she read the letter for a second time, Percy Weasley came downstairs, looking furious.

"Ah, Adira. Have you seen either of the twins lately?"

"Uh, no. Why?"

"Because those two put a load of grass snakes in my trunk. I want them to take the dratted things out, and I also want to drag the two of them to McGonagall. If they're going to keep targeting me for their pranks, then they're going to pay the price."

"They do seem to pick on you an awful lot. I think it means they like you, ironically."

"I find that unlikely. They like you a lot, but have you ever been pranked?"

"Um... not much. Maybe they're afraid of Al hexing their legs backwards?"

Percy snorted in disbelief. Adira prodded his feelings with her empathic sense, and got rather a lot more information than she'd expected.

"You know, it occurs to me now that everything you achieve, they tease you about. I know for a fact that they like you, but, well... that doesn't excuse their behavior."

Percy looked relieved. "I'm glad someone else sees it. And it's not just the twins, either. I never hear a positive word from Ron, either."

"I dunno about the twins, but Ron gets really jealous. He wants to outshine Charlie and Bill, too. He's probably sore that yet another older brother is doing so well for himself. He already feels like he's got too much to live up to, and then you keep raising the bar. It doesn't excuse his being a berk, but it does explain it."

Percy sat down next to her and sighed heavily. "Thank you, Adira. It is exhausting, being excited about things, and the only people in my family who've ever had a positive word to say about it being mum and dad. I just want the others to be proud of me. I work hard for everything I get. I'm taking every class in the syllabus, too. Unlike Hermione, I've actually been managing it well enough."

"Oh, so do you have a time turner too?"

"Er... told you about that, did she? I rather thought she was more sensible than that."

"Only after she'd turned it in. I think she didn't consider you might have one too."

"Yes, well... I guess the kneazle is out of the bag, now."

"I won't tell anyone. Not even Ron or Hermione."

"Thank you, Adira. I keep it on me at all times, but still... I worry what the twins would do with it if they found out."

She nodded. "Well _I'm_ happy for you, even if I didn't say it before. Head Boy is quite an achievement, on top of Prefect. I hope to do as well as you someday. Of course, I'm not doing every subject like you, but still..."

"Thank you, Adira. I appreciate it."

"Would you like me or Iliana to speak with the twins and the others about their behavior? We can do it without making it seem like you asked us. Which you didn't."

"I suppose you can try. I think Iliana is the only person aside from Mum that the twins really listen to. I think she intimidates them."

"Yeah, she has that effect. Anyway, I don't know where they are, but I could get those snakes out of your trunk for you. I don't imagine they like being in there."

"Thank you again. I'll show you the way. Follow me."

She nodded, and got up. A few minutes later, she was gently coaxing the grass snakes out of the trunk in Parseltongue and telling them to follow her and she'd guide them back outside. Shortly thereafter, she was seen by many people, being followed by at least a dozen snakes as she guided them down to the entrance hall and out the door.

"That was cool, Adira!" George said as she came back in. "Were those the snakes we put in Percy's trunk?"

She glowered at them, crossing her arms. Despite being much taller than her, the two twins cowered at her glare.

"Yes, those were the snakes you bullied your brother with."

"Bullied? I wouldn't say we-"

"Well I would. I grew up with a bully, I know what bullying is like. Pranks should be funny for everyone involved. Snakes in Percy's trunk is not a funny prank. Nor is, let's see," she thought, counting on her fingers, "stealing his Head Boy badge and changing it to say 'Bighead Boy,' mocking the way he speaks when he's proud and trying to bring it up to people, putting beetles in his soup, pushing him into a pyramid, teasing him about having a girlfriend, and who knows what else over the years?"

"But that was all in good fun," Fred said as though he didn't really believe his own words.

"Look at it from Percy's perspective: constantly teased, never a positive word said to him, and whenever he's justifiably proud about something he's worked hard for, he gets mocked by you and Ron, and occasionally Ginny, too. You may be intending these things in good fun, but well intentioned actions can still hurt. Percy doesn't let on much, but it does make him rather grumpy, maybe you've noticed that much."

"He's always been grumpy, though," said George. "We were trying to make him loosen up."

"Perhaps. But he's not you, the things that would loosen you two up don't work on him. Percy responds more to respect. He wants people to be as excited about his achievements as he is. Would you mock Hermione's way of speaking after she excitedly started going on about getting a great score on a test? Or after she had managed to perfect the use of difficult magic?"

The twins looked shame-facedly at one another before responding. "Of course not!" Fred said. "That would be mean! She'd be hurt!"

"And yet that's the sort of thing you do to Percy all the time."

They stared, first at her, then at each other, as though they'd never thought about it before. Which they likely hadn't.

"Blimey, George, she's right! We've been a pair of jerks for years now!"

"How do we apologize? He'll be expecting it's another prank."

"I could go with you," Adira said.

"Thanks, but still, what do we say?"

"You'll think of something. Come on, no time like the present."

She prodded them forward and they made their way up to Griffindor tower, the twins talking all the way, trying to figure out how to make it up to Percy.

When they got there, Percy looked surprised to see them. He looked even more surprised to see their plainly abashed body language. He sat there and listened quietly as they stumbled through an apology, one that ended up being long and rambling, the twins talking about what Adira had told them, and how they'd not intended, consciously at least, to be mean to him.

"...and yeah, we know we tease you about everything when you're proud about stuff, because you have a tendency to sound stuffy and boring, but that doesn't make it right. The fact that we're not interested in the same things as you are doesn't mean we aren't proud of you. You do work hard, we should let you know once in a while that we're happy for you, if a bit put out by the repetitiveness of it."

"Yeah, Perce, what he said. Also, I'm sorry if our pranks have been mean spirited."

"We both are."

"We'll be better, we swear. We won't play any pranks on you until we can figure out what'd be actually in good fun for you."

"Or otherwise work out a way to balance things out."

Percy regarded them curiously. When they stopped speaking, he turned to Adira.

"Are they telling the truth?"

"Yes. I can usually tell when people are lying; Snape and Dumbledore being exceptions. They're being honest."

"Good. I accept your apologies, Fred, George. But I'll keep an eye on you, and call you out if you slip up."

The twins grinned sheepishly. "Fine by us."

Percy held out his hand, and they took turns shaking it.

"I'll get Ron later, Percy," Adira told him.

"Good, good. Thank you for your help, Adira."

"No problem."

Adira told Ron off for his behavior towards Percy the next day. Ron was angry and defensive at first, but then the more Adira spoke, the more abashed he looked. He ended up apologizing to his brother by the end of the day, which pleased both Percy and Adira. Percy, surprising even Adira, actually hugged his brother by way of accepting the apology, which made Ron protest feebly, trying to hide his grin.

After that, the rest of the month passed fairly straightforwardly. Classes progressed, including her anti-dementor lessons with Lupin. Iliana continued having Quidditch practice. Birthdays were celebrated. The only problem was, as they discovered, related to Iliana's and Adira's monthlies. While switching to Al or Zoey could suppress the menstruation for a while, it just came back with a vengeance when they switched back, and so it ended up being easier and shorter to just suffer for a few days than to drag it out for a week or two by transforming.

Even though it was a whole month before Easter that Hermione had left Divination, Trelawney still insisted she'd predicted Hermione leaving. Of course, Al was quick to point out that it was hardly a mystical prediction if you kept harassing someone until they left to get away from you. This, of course, got him more detentions with her.

When Easter holidays came, Sirius was finally released from St. Mungo's. He came to Hogwarts to fetch Adira and take her to the flat he was thinking of getting, in a building in London that was owned by a witch and wizard couple, a building full of dozens of magical flats.

It looked like quite an ordinary building on the outside, of course. A rather run-down and ratty sort of place, in fact. In fact, it looked from the outside like the sort of place that the Dursleys would have called a 'hole in the wall' sort of place. Adira imagined a single small room with a bed-bug riddled twin mattress, a toilet and sink in the same room as the bed, and a single battered set of dresser drawers. She also imagined Uncle Dursley saying "Even the roaches would be moving down in the world, moving in there." Except that such a sentence would require more imagination than her uncle posessed.

The inside corridors didn't look any better. The wallpaper was torn and peeling off the walls. The stairs were rickety, creaking and groaning with every step. In the few places where there was wood, that wood looked like it had been through several centuries of hard wear. It rather reminded her of the inside of the Shrieking Shack, in fact; except the Shack was swankier.

Finally, they were led to the battered door to flat number 23B. The hinges were rusty. But when she opened the door, which meant she had to disengage some wards first, the door opened to something unexpected.

Inside the flat was a whole other story from the building's appearances. Inside 23B was the inside of a mansion. Bigger on the inside, it had over a dozen rooms, each one large and spacious and already stocked with furniture. There were at least 6 bedrooms, a drawing room, a large dining room, a dozen or more bathrooms, a spiral staircase up to other levels, and a dueling practice room. What's more, the place was clean and well maintained.

"How does this place stay clean?" Adira asked the landlady witch.

"Oh, we have a staff of house elves that clean the rooms. Don't worry, they're bound to keep the secrets and silence of all residents and former residents, same as in Hogwarts."

"How many house elves do you have?"

"We have plenty of them. I don't remember the exact number offhand. Might be 15. Yes, that sounds right."

"Only 15?"

The middle-aged witch smiled at her. "Well, not all the flats are quite so spacious inside as this one. If you're worried about the poor dears being overworked, they'd tell us if they were overworked, trust me on that. Our elves are very vocal about their needs. Polite, and still obedient, but vocal. The head elf gave us quite the earful the one time we gave them too much to do. And another time when we didn't give them _enough_ to do."

"Oh okay."

"Want to look around inside, dearie?"

"Sure."

She let them in, and Adira stared in wonder at the huge place, wandering around the place and looking at everything, from the huge kitchen to the bedrooms to the dueling practice room.

"It's huge!" Adira commented at last. "And gorgeous."

"Yeah, it's a little more ostentatious than my usual style," Sirius said, "but when I saw the dueling room, I knew I had to get it. Given how often Volde-"

"EEK!" squealed the landlady.

"-mort and others try to attack you, I figured you might want somewhere to practice getting better at fighting for your life. Especially with your mother's blood protection broken. Plus, the building itself has lots of high-end wards on it, and I plan to get a bunch more put on our flat in particular. I'm even going to be using goblin-made wards as well as wizard-made wards."

"It's perfect! I mean, if you really want to spend this much on me."

"Of course I do. My best friend and his wife died, I want to keep their daughter safe," he said, ruffling her hair.

The witch stared suddenly at Adira's forehead.

"Wait, are you... are you Harry Potter?"

"Not anymore I'm not. I'm Adira Potter now."

"Hold on, that's not official yet. You'll have to register your name change at the Ministry."

"Can we do that over the holidays?"

"Not yet. But in the summer we can, for sure."

"Oh, er," said the witch. "So you are the famous Potter? But your name is different now? And you're a girl?"

"Yes."

The witch looked a little uncomfortable about this, but said nothing. Then she plastered on a smile.

"So are you satisfied with the flat?"

"I dunno. Adira?"

"I love it."

"We'll take it."

Adira explored the flat some more while the adults took care of the boring details of the lease and payment and so on. Sirius came and found her when they were done.

"We can move in today, Adira. Pick out a bedroom for yourself, and I'll do the same."

"I already know which one I want!"

She ran upstairs, and Sirius followed. Adira picked out the bedroom nearest the dueling room, a bedroom which had its own bathroom and wasn't too far from the staircase. Sirius took one down the hall. That left four unused bedrooms which could be used for guest bedrooms.

"Galloping gargoyles!" Sirius exclaimed.

"What is it?"

"It has windows! My parents' house doesn't have windows. Of course, there was only the front and back that could have had windows, but even those were windowless. They didn't want to be able to see the Muggle households nearby. Admittedly, the view isn't all that great from here, either, but at least the air is fresh."

"My bedroom has windows, too!" Adira called from her room. "I didn't notice them at first behind the curtains."

"Well this makes sending owls easier. Whenever we wanted to send an owl at my parents' house, we had to go out back. Anyway, speaking of owls, I need to send one to Gringott's, let them know we're ready for the new wards to be put in place."

"I left Hedwig at home."

"That's alright. I came prepared," Sirius said, pulling a cage out of his robes.

In the cage was a very small owl, which was twittering around madly like it wanted to be set loose. It looked like a tiny, feathery tennis ball.

"Scops owl, local deliveries only. I was checking out the owl post office in Hogsmeade and this little guy caught my attention. I was going to give him to Ron to replace his rat, but I've grown fond of the little fellow, I think he's funny. Plus, from what you've told me of Ron, he'd probably hate the poor thing. I haven't named him yet, though. Can't decide on a name. I call him Owl for now."

Sirius let the tiny owl out of its cage, and it flew around the room like a feathery snitch.

"Calm down! Calm down you little feathery goofball! I have a letter for you!" Sirius said with a laugh, catching it in one hand and struggling to tie a letter to the small owl's leg.

"Take this to Griphook at Gringott's, understand?"

The small owl hooted at him in acknowledgement.

"Good," Sirius said, tossing the small bird out the window. Adira gasped and rushed to the window to watch the bird plummet ten feet before gaining altitude again as it flew off toward Diagon Alley.

"Wouldn't it have been faster to Floo over there?"

"Yeah, but we're close enough to Gringott's that I wouldn't mind getting a good look around the place before they get here. Plus, why take the risk going out if we don't have to?"

"You just don't want to put up with the looks, right?"

Sirius looked uncomfortable, and didn't respond.

"It's okay, Sirius, I get it. I get looks all the time. Granted, they're not the same looks that you get, but I get it. I guess it'd be like my second year of Hogwart's, but all the time."

"Yeah, it's taking some getting used to. But I suppose people won't get over it as fast if I don't go out more and make them get used to seeing me."

Adira nodded.

"Well, I'm famished. Let's go get some Chinese, what do you think?"

"Sounds cool. I've never had Chinese before. Never had anything that the Dursleys would consider foreign. Not even spaghetti or pizza."

"Really? Well we'll have to fix that this summer. I'm a horrible cook anyway, so we might as well order out as much as we can. I'll introduce you to Chinese food, Thai food, Indian curries, spaghetti, pizza, all sorts of things! Got to expand that palette of yours."

"Will your owl be able to find you if we go out, though?"

"Yeah, it'll be fine. If not, he'll be here when we get back."

Without further ado, they left the flat and locked the wards. Adira tried ignoring the dilapidated appearance of the building as they headed down to the street. Once there, they walked a couple blocks to a Chinese restaurant and sat down at one of the tables.

Not knowing what to get, Adira finally settled on a variety platter with five different things on it. There was kung pao shrimp, General Tso's chicken, orange chicken, Chinese style pork slices, and crab rangoons. It was all delicious. Sirius laughed til he cried when Adira tried the kung pao shrimp and started coughing and grabbing for the water, but after the surprise of it was over, she enjoyed the spiciness of the dish, and ate the whole thing.

Their bellies full, and their hearts full from the excited babbles and thanks from the waitress when Sirius gave her a 20 pound tip, they went home. As soon as they opened the door to the flat, they saw the small owl fluttering around like mad with a reply tied to its leg. Sirius grabbed it and removed the letter, reading it as the tiny owl flew around Adira's head.

"The goblins will fire-call us soon, and Floo over when I respond. I'd better get over to the drawing room, then. That's the only fireplace connected to the Floo."

Curious, Adira followed along. They arrived just in time to see a face in the green flames, looking something like the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz, except it was a goblin.

"About time," the goblin said impatiently. "I was about to pull out and try again in half an hour. Is it safe to come through?"

"According to the landlady, it is."

"Good. Here we come."

The face vanished from the fire, and soon the goblin was stepping out of the fireplace, brushing ash off his clothes. Soon after him came a wizard in green robes.

"My name is Fangslaughter," said the goblin. "This is Benedict Snaggletooth, our resident ward expert. He'll be helping me."

Adira was fascinated by the pair of them and their work, but it didn't take long to become boring, and so she took a deck of Exploding Snap cards out of her robes and began to play while she waited for them to finish.

After over an hour, they got her attention again and explained how to open the door through the wards without setting them off. They also explained that there were anti-Apparition wards on the flat. One could get through the Floo still, but coming in, the farthest you could come in without activating the wards was the stone in front of the fireplace. Coming in via Floo would make your arms and legs snap to your sides and you'd stand there frozen in place, only your mouth able to move in order to give the password, which could only be given by Sirius or one of the Potters, and was tied to their blood, meaning nobody else could give the password and have it work. Giving the password would unfreeze your body so you could use your wand to unlock the second set of wards holding you in place, so you could enter the drawing room properly. Guests could be pulled in through the wards by Sirius or Adira and company after the password was given, no matter who the password was given by.

"Of course," said the goblin, "if you try to do anything else with your wand after giving the password, such as trying to hex the people beyond the wards, the hex will rebound onto you, and then you'll be completely locked in place and stunned, which will alert the Ministry, and they will send aurors to investigate."

"Cool," remarked Adira.

"Thank you, Miss Potter."

Sirius handed the goblin, Fangslaughter, a sack of money. "For your troubles, sir."

Fangslaughter looked confused. "You already paid us, Mr. Black. It's part of the contract, payment in advance."

"It's a gratuity. To show you how much I appreciate your hard work. Here's one for you as well, Mr. Snaggletooth," he said, handing another bag of money to the wizard.

The goblin looked in his. "There must be 20 galleons in here!"

"Yes. Adira and I are _very_ appreciative."

"Yes, thank you very much, Mister Fangslaughter," Adira said, bowing to the goblin.

Fangslaughter's eyes went wide with surprise. Then his face resolved into a thoughtful look.

"It's just Fangslaughter, Miss Potter. And thank you for your surprising show of respect. It is unusual of wizards. Both of you are very unusual in that regard."

"Thank you," they both answered in unison.

Still bewildered, and also looking _very_ forward to counting his gold, Fangslaughter went back through the Floo to Gringott's. Mr. Snaggletooth soon followed him.

For the rest of the day, Sirius told Adira lots of stories about her parents, especially Marauder stories, even over dinner of Indian food from another nearby shop. When Sirius finally had to stop because his throat – still not used to speaking after Azkaban – got all scratchy and sore, Adira went upstairs to work on her homework, which they had a lot of over Easter holidays.

She was halfway through Potions homework when she yawned very loudly. Setting her things aside on the desk, she got up and showered, changed, then went to bed. It was very easy to get to sleep; the bed was very soft and comfortable, and had warming charms built in.

How long she slept, she didn't know, but too quickly she startled awake, sitting bolt upright, trying to figure out what had woken her. Then she heard the screaming again, from Sirius's room, and bolted out of the room into his.

Sirius was tossing around so much that he looked tied into his bed, and he was screaming in his sleep. She approached him warily, not knowing what to do. Not everyone with problems like this could be dealt with the same way; some people preferred to be prodded awake, while others would go into full self-defence mode if touched at all in their sleep. Not knowing which to do, she opted for speech.

"Sirius? Sirius, you're just dreaming. It's me, Adira. James's kid. You're safe here, Sirius. Sirius?"

She tried again, louder. Then once more, even louder. Sirius finally jerked awake, sitting bolt upright in bed, looking around the room. When he saw her, he relaxed visibly.

"Adira. Sorry if I woke you."

"No problem, Padfoot. You went through 12 years of Hell. And now you're in a new place, an unfamiliar place. I know what it's like, having nightmares."

"Ah yes, I remember you mentioning that."

"Do you..." she trailed off, thinking, and walked over to hold his hand. "Can I help you at all?"

"Oh Adira. It's me who should be helping you. I'm the dogfather, I mean godfather."

They both chuckled at his joke.

Adira sat down on the bed next to him, still holding his hand.

"I'm serious, Sirius; I want to help you."

"That's sweet, Adira. But I don't know what you could do."

"Have you tried sleeping as a dog?"

"Yeah. Doesn't help much."

"What if I invited Padfoot to sleep at the end of my bed?"

Sirius scowled in thought. He looked like the idea left a sour note in his mouth. She cocked her head curiously at him.

"Oh, sorry about the weird look. It's just... I'm an adult, I shouldn't be sleeping in your bed, even as a dog. It reminds me of Peter."

"What about at the foot of the bed, on the floor? Maybe a little doggy bed?"

"You're insistent, aren't you? Well, alright. I'll try it once. I can conjure a doggy bed. But I'll need a large one, not a little one."

She shrugged. "Figure of speech."

He followed her to her room, and conjured a doggy bed at the foot of her own.

"Just... just try to not forget I'm here. I don't want to see anything I shouldn't. Alright?"

"Understood. By the way, if you have a nightmare in your doggy sleep, is it okay to pet you? Or should I do something else?"

"Try waking me up with words first. Then petting my side might be okay. I can smell your scent in my dog form, which helps. Don't touch me when I'm sleeping as a human, though. I don't respond well to that."

"Okay, understood. Sleep well, Sirius."

"You too," he said, transforming into his dog form.

She looked curiously at it; the last time she'd seen his animagus form, the giant black dog had been skeletally thin, with fleas, and a little mangy in patches. But he had a lot more meat on his bones now, with well-groomed fur, and looked very healthy and happy.

Padfoot whuffed lightly at her, then spun around on the doggy bed a few times before settling down. Adira smiled, and got back into her own bed.

She didn't fall asleep right away. By the sound of it, Sirius as Padfoot fell asleep before she did, as his breathing evened out and slowed. Adira fell asleep to the sound of the dog's slow breathing.

When she woke up the next morning, the dog bed was empty. Since the door was closed, she presumed Sirius had turned himself back into a man in order to turn the knob. She opened the door and stepped out, curious. She heard faint sounds from the kitchen, including cussing. She smiled at that; Sirius was trying to make breakfast, it seemed.

Returning to her room, she got undressed and bathed, then changed into a green Muggle full-length dress, slipping her slippers onto her feet before going downstairs.

Sirius was still struggling in the kitchen, and by the smell of it, he was burning his attempt at breakfast. He was angrily tossing the burnt remains of what looked like bacon into a bin – a magical, fire-proof bin – when she entered the room.

Looking up at her, he half-grinned, the other half of his expression still annoyed.

"Hey there, Adira. Third attempt lost so far, sadly. After the first one burned, I tried cooking less bacon. Did the smoke wake you?"

"No. I didn't smell it till I came down. Anyway, let me do that. I know how to cook, and I'm pretty good at it."

"Thanks for the offer, but I'm supposed to be providing for you, not the other way 'round."

"That's okay. I don't mind cooking to help friends and family. _Real_ family, I mean; not the Dursleys. I hated cooking for _them_."

"But-"

"No buts," she said, taking the frying pan from him with a grin. "You're providing the materials, I'm providing the skills. Real families share chores. You can buy the things we need, I can cook them."

"Fine, I suppose," he said, grumbling. "But I don't like it. Soon as I can, I'm gonna learn how to do it myself."

"I should hope so, or you'll eat nothing but pizza and Chinese food whenever I'm at school."

"Hey! I don't just eat pizza or Chinese food!"

"Oh?"

"No. I eat Indian and Japanese food, too."

Adira laughed. Sirius laughed too. Adira was still chuckling while she started the eggs and bacon.

"And Thai food! Don't forget Thai food."

"Yes, but you still go out to eat a lot, and going out to eat should be a treat, not an everyday thing."

"I've been in Azkaban for 12 years and St. Mungo's ever since. Eating out everyday _is_ a treat for me."

"Yes, but for how long? And besides, bacon!"

"You raise an excellent point, pup. Bacon is the food of the gods."

When the eggs and bacon were done, Sirius ate some of the bacon and closed his eyes, moaning.

"What're you doing over there," she felt Alastair say with her voice, "it sounds obscene."

"Just enjoying my first bacon for 12 years."

"They didn't give you bacon in St. Mungo's?" Adira asked.

"Of course not. They're healers, and bacon is heart attack on a plate."

"Ah, yeah, that makes sense," she said, making herself a bacon and egg sandwich with ketchup and cheddar cheese.

"Speaking of heart attack on a plate, pup..." Sirius said, eyeing her sandwich.

She shrugged. "It's got lettuce in it, too."

"Ah, then that means it has no calories, cleans your pores, and makes you look 5 years younger!"

"I'm 13, but I look like I'm 11. I don't need to look any younger, thanks."

After breakfast, Sirius took Adira with him into Diagon Alley to get casual robes for her, and also Muggle London to buy her some Muggle clothes that were flattering and stylish.

During their outing, Sirius took her to a sushi shop he liked, and so she had her first ever taste of sushi. It was a kind of food she'd never felt like trying, but she tried once for Sirius, and found to her surprise that she loved it. She especially loved the salmon rolls, the California rolls, the ones with avocado in them, and even found the edamame to be delicious. The sushi was a dollar per plate, and though she went in expecting to get maybe three dollars worth, in the end there were almost 15 plates just on Adira's side of the table alone. Between the two of them, their bill was over $30 before the tip.

"I had no idea, when I went in and saw those tiny little sushi rolls, that I'd manage to get full, let alone so full I feel like I need to be rolled home," she said as they left.

Sirius burped richly. "I know what you mean. I felt the same way the first time I went to a sushi place. James and I ended up sitting in the corner of the room digesting for an hour before we left, we were both useless lumps. By the way, it took me weeks to convince James to try sushi. With you, I only had to cajole you for about an hour. You're far more open to new experiences than James was. He was adventurous about a lot of things, but food wasn't one of those. Every new thing I had him try was like pulling teeth. Then he'd act like he'd liked it all along."

"Yeah, well, anything the Dursleys hate must be worth at least trying. And the Dursleys would sooner let you in your dog form enter the house and muddy the carpets before even thinking about getting anywhere near a sushi place.

"Anyway, I hope we get home soon. Now I know what the sitting room is for. It's for sitting and digesting a large meal before you can do anything else."

"Amen to that, pup."

"I don't think I even have room for dessert, even if we had anything to have for dessert."

"So going out for ice cream is a no go?"

"Not until I've sat around digesting my meal for an hour or two, at least."

They didn't end up going out for ice cream. Not as such, anyway. Instead, Sirius went to a nearby Tesco and bought a box of ice cream sandwiches for them to share.

"Over the summer, we'll definitely have to go out for ice cream. Maybe Florean Fortescue's; his stuff is always amazing."

On the final day of the Easter holidays, Sirius said his farewells at the train, but intimated that he would be going to Hogwarts ahead of her to fetch his motorbike from Hagrid. And since he didn't know what kind of shape it would be in, he didn't know how long it would take to be done there. That would depend on how much work he needed to put into the charms and the physical structure of the motorbike.

The next morning, Iliana woke up to find they'd switched during the night for unknown reasons. After a long hard day of classes, she checked with Sirius on her two-way mirror, and found he'd been there most of the day reinforcing the charms on the bike before taking it home and parking it in the apartment building's garage, which apparently was accessed from an alley in the back.

Later in the week, the day before the Griffindor/Slytherin Quidditch match, they received an owl package from Sirius. There was a glowing note on the packaging, which she read, and good thing. The note said to not open the package until she was alone or just with Ron and Hermione, since Sirius wasn't sure it was, strictly speaking, allowed by the rules for her to have the particular book he'd sent. Her curiosity was piqued all day long, it was hard for her to concentrate, she kept thinking about it. Ron was excited, too, and kept speculating about its contents. Even Hermione found it difficult to hide her interest, though they had to put up with her wondering if Sirius had sent something that would get them into trouble.

And so, the three friends went into Iliana's room after dinner and watched Iliana open it.

"'Animagi: A History and How-To Guide,' by Állat Hayop." she read aloud the title.

"Cool! You can learn how to be an animagus! Then the next time You-Know-Who tries to get you, you can escape as an animal."

"But it's illegal for her to learn without being monitored by the Ministry," Hermione said. "And then she'll have to register, and that would sort of defeat the purpose. Also, changing right in front of You-Know-Who or his Death Eaters would expose her form to them."

"He'll be back someday, Hermione. So I should learn, and keep it a secret from the Ministry. At least until after he's properly dead and his followers are all captured."

"Yes, but-"

"But what? We brewed an illegal Polyjuice Potion in second year to try to figure out who the Heir of Slytherin was. Being an animagus could be a huge weapon in the coming war. Plus, if I figure it out, I can help you and Ron figure it out, too. Which will protect the two of you, as well. War is coming, Hermione. He's going to come back someday, and we need all the secret weapons we can get."

"Oh, well," Hermione said, "I suppose that makes sense. Well alright, I won't tell anyone."

"Besides which, it's gonna take me ages to learn, I'm sure, even with Sirius's help. But once I know it, I'll help you two. You can register after Moldywart is dead."

"Cool," said Ron. "I wonder what my form will be."

"I'm not too particular," Iliana said, "Just as long as I'm not a rat. Or a mouse."

"Ugh, yeah. I don't ever want to be reminded of... well... you know," Ron said.

"Hmm," Hermione said, thinking. "I guess a secret weapon is a good idea in case he ever comes back." She got thoughtful. "I wonder what my animal would be?"

"My guess is bookworm," Ron said.

"Eww, no," Iliana said. "Silverfish _eat_ books. They destroy them."

"Silverfish?" Ron asked.

"The proper name for the insect commonly known as a bookworm," Hermione said.

"Yuck," Ron exclaimed. "Not an insect, that would be disgusting. Who would want to be a bug? Bugs are gross."

"Well, not a silverfish, but you could be a literal fly on the wall. That would be useful, I could spy on the Death Eaters and report back to the Ministry or Dumbledore."

"Makes sense. But it might be better to become something that can get away fast. I wonder if you can become magical animals? You could become a demiguise."

"I have an invisibility cloak already, Ron, I don't need to become a demiguise."

"Or a dragon! Hell, Tier was breathing fire that one time, he almost looked like a dragon."

"It'd have to be a small dragon. I'll need to be able to change in my bedroom to practice. And anyway, I don't want to be a dragon. Dragons aren't nice, and who knows how much of the animal's personality crosses over when you change?"

They discussed it some more, the conversation eventually going on to other things, until it grew quite late, and Ron and Hermione left to go to bed. Iliana stayed up reading the Animagi book for an hour before she, too, had to go to sleep. By habit, she moved to take glasses off, but then remembered they were in Iliana's body now, and she didn't need glasses. But before she could think too much on it, her mind grew fuzzy and warm, and soon sleep had found her.

***END CHAPTER***

End note 1: Actually, I think Fred and George wouldn't mess with Percy's time turner. The punishments for messing with time are harsh enough they wouldn't put Percy in that situation. Or if they did, they'd take full blame.


	20. The Strange Prophecy

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 20"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty:** **The Strange Prophecy**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. It's been frustrating me, too, but some things are just too perfect already to change. Which, fair warning, includes most of the conversation Fudge, Hagrid, Flitwick, and McGonagall have in The Three Broomsticks.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__

Chapter blurb: It's towards the end of the school year. Quidditch matches, exams, and... genuine prophecies? What surprises lay in store for the Potters?

 _ _***__ _FAYANORA_ _ _***__

The first two weeks back from Easter holidays weren't terribly exciting. The collective mostly did homework, studied, and practiced Quidditch in preparation for the coming game with Slytherin. They also got quite a workout avoiding being tripped or hexed by Slytherins as the big match approached, as tensions were running high. They were doing well enough that, as Wood kept reminding them, Iliana would have to wait until the Griffindor team was more than 50 points up before catching the snitch, and as much as she was fond of the older boy, she found his constant nagging irritating.

"We KNOW, Oliver! If you don't stop nagging us about that, you're liable to trigger Al to appear, and that will lose us the game for sure," she even threatened, which finally shut him up. It was no idle threat, either; Al's irritation had been growing for days.

They didn't sleep well the night of the match, either, and Iliana was very nervous as she went down to breakfast with their Firebolt, hardly eating anything from nerves. The applause helped a little, but not much. And when Cho Chang wished her luck, she blushed so hard she was afraid she'd accidentally retreat at the worst possible time, and had to sit there concentrating on staying in the front for a few minutes before heading down to the pitch.

It was so tense in the locker rooms that nobody spoke until it was time to go, and that was just a brief command from Wood, saying it was time. They went out onto the pitch to tumultuous applause and, of course, boos from the Slytherins.

They got into position, the balls were released, and-

"They're off!"

She flew in the air fast as she could. She was wearing goggles over her eyes, because the Firebolt was so fast that the wind dried her eyes out otherwise, and she was glad to have that protection now, judging by the fact that her hair was causing her actual pain as it whipped her skin. Malfoy, she could see, was trying to keep up, but a Nimbus 2001 had nothing on a Firebolt, and knowing the Slytherins had a tendency to cheat, she didn't want to give Malfoy the opportunity to do something. So she sped around, looking here and there and everywhere for the snitch as she did so. Also keeping an eye on Malfoy, just in case.

She listened to the commentary as well. It was very important that she wait until they were more than 50 points up before she caught the snitch.

Sure enough, the Slytherins were cheating. After Griffindor got their first goal, Marcus Flint deliberately ran into the chaser responsible, Angelina Johnson.

Iliana was finding that their being a multiple was helpful in this case. Unable to concentrate on all the things she needed to do at once, Iliana began delegating tasks to the others. Al kept a wary eye on the Slytherins, and Adira was listening to the commentary and nothing else, which freed Iliana up to look for the snitch. Iliana herself tuned out the commentary and waited for updates from Adira.

 _Thirty zero Griffindor,_ Adira informed her.

She didn't respond. She didn't need to.

After a few minutes, she spotted the snitch. Al informed her without words of Malfoy's whereabouts. Getting a sudden idea, she dived in the opposite direction as though she'd spotted the snitch. Sure enough, Malfoy followed her.

WHOOSH.

One of the Slytherins had hit a bludger so it went past her ear.

WHOOSH.

Another one went past her elbow. The two Slytherin chasers were flying right at her. At the last second, she pulled up and zoomed off, and the two idiots crashed into each other with a sickening crunch.

Iliana went back to her business. She was glad to find the snitch was gone again, and Malfoy was still attempting to tail her.

 _Holy hippogriffs this game is dirty,_ Adira commented after a few minutes. _Even the Griffindors are playing dirty. Forty-ten Griffindor, by the way._

She kept flying, kept looking for the snitch, Al silently updating her on Malfoy's position every now and then.

And Angelina scored. _Sixty-ten_ , came Adira's update. Moments later, Fred Weasley pelted a Bludger at Warrington, knocking the Quaffle out of his hands; Alicia seized it and put it through the Slytherin goal.

S _eventy-ten_. _Now's the time. By the way..._

Iliana felt Adira turn their head to get a better look at something. Sure enough, Adira had spotted the snitch, high above them.

Shooting into the air fast as she could, the wind whipped through her hair. But they slowed down briefly despite this. Without her head turning to look, she felt Al grab the body, slide it down the broom, and kick something squishy with one foot, letting them sped up again. She could hear Al laughing in their head as she shot toward the snitch

But then a bludger hit them, knocking them sideways, and in their panic something weird happened; Iliana's body got smaller, her robes staying the same size. But judging by her voice when she shrieked at the Slytherin beaters in a fury, she wasn't Zoey. The hair whipping around her was still red, and it was a younger version of her voice that she spoke with.

The Slytherins had got their way, though; the snitch was gone. Iliana took a moment to call on Zoey to switch them back, but they were stuck. So Zoey shrank their robes down to fit the smaller body instead.

Flying on the broom was a much more difficult experience this much smaller. She had gotten so used to pushing or pulling in certain spots, pitching her weight around in certain ways to turn it, that the difference in size, weight, and mass was disconcerting to say the least. But on straight-line paths, it was a boon, since weighing less got them able to go faster. But the goggles falling down from her eyes because they were too big for her head now sucked. Specifically, it sucked the moisture out of her eyes and made it harder to see.

Griffindor got a penalty for Malfoy's cheat, but Alicia was so angry that she missed it.

Iliana tried to concentrate on finding the snitch. They went back to their teamwork pattern, Adira listening to the commentary and Al watching the Slytherins. And now, Zoey was working one-handed to try to adjust the strap on the goggles while Iliana looked for the snitch.

Once the goggles were back on, Iliana decided to get Malfoy back by marking him, like he'd done to her earlier. She followed him around everywhere, getting right next to him, so close they kept knocking knees.

"Get out of it, Potter!" Malfoy yelled in frustration as he tried to turn and found Iliana blocking him.

 _Something is happening,_ Adira told her a bit later, pointing her head to see.

The whole Slytherin team, sans Malfoy, was flying to block Angelina scoring. Iliana moved away and zoomed straight at them. Even smaller now, they wouldn't want to get hit by someone going as fast as she was, so they scattered, and Angelina was able to score.

Skidding to a halt, she spotted Malfoy diving for the snitch, and hurried to catch up. Being smaller wasn't helping now, as Malfoy's weight was pulling him toward the ground, but he couldn't be allowed to grab it, so she scooted forward, pulled one foot against the front of the broom, and leaped into the air, grabbing Malfoy around the neck.

"ACK! WHAT THE HELL?" he shouted, trying to fight her off. Adira noted Madam Hooch calling about a penalty to Slytherin, but the snitch had vanished again. Adira also noted that Wood saved it. They were still more than 50 points up.

"Turnabout is fair play, Malfoy," she said, using his back to jump back to her own broom and take off again. But it was a close call – her broom-tail brushed the ground as she took off. Malfoy was not so lucky, and landed face-first into the grass.

With Madam Hooch running onto the pitch to check Malfoy's vitals, Iliana spotted the snitch again, off by the Griffindor goal posts, and shot after it fast as lightning, snatching it out of the air.

"YES!" She screamed, holding the struggling snitch in her hands as she whooped out a victory cheer. The spectator box exploded with noise when they realized what she'd done.

Iliana flew down to the ground, her teammates flying after her. Wood picked her up and swung her around, sobbing with joy into her shoulder. She felt two large thumps as Fred and George hit them; then Angelina's, Alicia's, and Katie's voices, " _We've won the Cup_! _We've won the Cup_!" Tangled together in a many-armed hug, the Gryffindor team sank, yelling hoarsely, back to earth.

Waves of crimson-clad Griffindor supporters washed over them and carried them to victory. Iliana could even hear Sirius's barks of laughter and shouts of glee over the crowd; he seemed to be near.

She pulled off the goggles again. "We won, Sirius! We won!"

"That you did," he said, looking at her eyes curiously. She wanted to ask him about it, but she got carried off with the rest of the team, to Griffindor tower.

The resulting party lasted a very long time, and was filled with songs, butterbeers the twins had snuck off to Hogsmeade to get, and people talking about the game.

"That was so awesome how you kicked Malfoy in the face when he was grabbing your broom!" Dean Thomas exclaimed.

"Yeah, it was weird," Ron said. "You were moving down the broom before he'd even grabbed the broom, and you only slowed down for a split second before kicking him."

"Oh yeah, that was Al. We were working as a team. Adira was listening to the commentary, and Al was keeping track of the Slytherins, especially Malfoy."

"And the way you tackled Malfoy, then jumped onto your broom from his back in the nick of time, it was bloody brilliant!"

"Thanks, Seamus. I think I almost died, but it was worth it. How's Malfoy, by the way?"

"He'll live," Ron said, sounding disappointed. "He only got plowed. I've seen much worse happen to quidditch players than that, and they were fine. He might be loopy for a few days, but he'll be fine after that."

"Iliana," Hermione said before Iliana could reply, "did you know you have one green eye and one blue eye, like Zoey?"

"Oh, do I? Well that explains what happened; our forms must have accidentally fused. You know, I almost lost my robes when that happened, I would've been up there naked on my broom if we hadn't been able to shrink the robes. As it was, I think our... oh shit! Our underwear is still out there! I..." she paused, feeling inside her robes. "Wait, no. Whew! It's still in there. Just barely. Thank goodness for that."

Everyone laughed at this. Even Iliana managed to laugh about it.

"Not that you'd have anything worth seeing, with your body like that," Dean said.

Suddenly the laughter stopped, and people looked uncomfortably at the black boy. But it felt to Iliana like there was something else there, something weirder. Like... oh. That. People were being reminded of her condition, which reminded many of them of what they normally thought of the Potters. How many of them thought she was a freak? There were so many emotions flying around now that it was all washing together for her.

Just then, the twins made confetti from their wands with a bang, and the party resumed as though nothing had happened. Even Iliana managed to forget, and get back into the swing of things.

The last dregs of the party were still going later, by the sound of it, when Iliana finally went to bed, past midnight, and drifted off despite the occasional noise. She would be back to normal when she woke up in the morning.

The next few weeks were fairly routine, a mix of schoolwork, studying, revision for the exams, interspersed with occasional talk of the last Quidditch game. On the weekends, Sirius came to visit, and so he, Adira, and Hagrid had tea together in Hagrid's hut. At one of these, they found out that Buckbeak was back to full health, despite Malfoy's hexing, and was well protected in a hidden paddock.

Then, in the second week of June, came the exams. The teachers didn't seem to care which of the Potters took which exam, so long as they took the exam and took it seriously. McGonagall seemed surprised that Zoey hadn't shown up to the transfiguration exam, but of course Zoey's abilities were – for some reason – hindered by their wand. So Adira took it instead. She also took the Ancient Runes exam after lunch, and the Charms exam after that. She overdid the cheering charm out of nerves, and Ron had to be taken away to calm down before his turn.

The next day, they did Care of Magical Creatures. Hagrid tested them on unicorn care and feeding, mostly, but there was also a bit in there about bowtruckles, little tree guardians that looked like twigs, that they'd had in a couple of his classes.

In the afternoon, Iliana showed up to the Potions exam. As often happened, Snape avoided looking at her, and – left to her own devices – she did pretty well. When she handed her finished potion to Snape, he looked at it with a sour look and gave a non-commital grunt, which for him was high praise. She did equally well in Astronomy when she took that exam at midnight.

Binns was still teaching History of Magic the next day, but they'd long since figured out that Tier had the ability to resist the soporific effect of the ghost teacher's droning, so he was very good for taking notes. Despite finding spoken language difficult even inside their shared mind, Tier was surprisingly eloquent when writing. So they showed up in Iliana's form, but Tier was controlling the body as they took the test.

None of them had any particular affinity for herbology, though, so Iliana just took back her body from Tier for that exam in the afternoon.

The day after that came their second-to-last exam, the exam everyone was most excited to have: Defense Against the Dark Arts with Professor Lupin. Professor Lupin had compiled the most unusual exam any of them had ever taken; a sort of obstacle course outside in the sun, where they had to wade across a deep paddling pool containing a grindylow, cross a series of potholes full of Red Caps, squish their way across a patch of marsh while ignoring misleading directions from a hinkypunk, then climb into an old trunk and battle with a new boggart.

"Excellent, Alastair," Lupin said as they climbed out of the trunk, for they'd woken up that day as Al. "Full marks."

Flushed with his success, Al hung around to watch Ron and Hermione. Ron did very well until he reached the hinkypunk, which successfully confused him into sinking waist-high into the quagmire. Hermione did everything perfectly until she reached the trunk with the boggart in it. After about a minute inside it, she burst out again, screaming.

"Hermione!" said Lupin, startled. "What's the matter?"

"P — P — Professor McGonagall!" Hermione gasped, pointing into the trunk. "Sh — she said I'd failed everything!"

It took a little while to calm Hermione down. When at last she had regained a grip on herself, she, Al, and Ron went back to the castle. Ron was still slightly inclined to laugh at Hermione's boggart, but Al slapped him on the back of the head and glared in a way reminiscent of Mrs. Weasley's best glares, which shut Ron right up.

Al's and Ron's final exam was Divination. Hermione had no more exams, so she went with them up to the seventh floor for moral support, where many of their class were sitting on the spiral staircase to Professor Trelawney's classroom, trying to cram in a bit of last-minute studying.

"She's seeing us all separately," Neville informed them as they went to sit down next to him. He had his copy of _Unfogging the Future_ open on his lap at the pages devoted to crystal gazing. "Have either of you ever seen _anything_ in a crystal ball?" he asked them unhappily.

"No," said Al. "This class is utterly useless. Trelawney is a fraud; I'd rather learn from someone who is actually a seer. So I'm considering dropping it, like Hermione did."

The line of people outside the classroom shortened very slowly. As each person climbed back down the silver ladder, the rest of the class hissed, "What did she ask? Was it okay?"

But they all refused to say.

"She says the crystal ball's told her that if I tell you, I'll have a horrible accident!" squeaked Neville as he clambered back down the ladder toward Harry and Ron, who had now reached the landing.

"Suspiciously convenient," Ron said. Al nodded.

The three of them talked, largely ignoring the other students as they finished up. Occasionally Al complained he was bored, and said he was considering turning Trelawney's hair blue.

Then it was Ron's turn. Al waited and waited. When Ron finally came back, he snorted with disgust.

"Rubbish," said Ron. "Couldn't see a thing, so I made some stuff up. Don't think she was convinced, though. …"

"Meet you in the common room," Harry muttered as Professor Trelawney's voice called, "Potter!"

"Clearly she couldn't predict which of us it was," Al said as he climbed up the ladder to the classroom.

The tower room was hotter than ever before; the curtains were closed, the fire was alight, and the usual sickly scent made Al cough as he stumbled through the clutter of chairs and tables to where Professor Trelawney sat waiting for him before a large crystal ball.

"Oh, it's you, is it, dear?" Trelawney said, looking very put out.

"Yeah, it's me. Try to calm down, I won't be giving autographs today," Al said in a deadpan way.

"Very funny. Sit down now, my dear. Do try to take this seriously. I know you do not think much of me, but you might get something out of this class if you try, despite what you think of me as a teacher."

"Sure, right," Al said in a bored voice.

Still, she had a point, so he did sit there, bored, staring into the crystal ball. He felt his gaze unfocus in his boredom as he stared, and then felt his mind unfocus as well. He was just zoned out, staring at the swirling shapes in this crystal ball, his brain disengaged entirely.

Then he began to speak, but it sounded far-off, and his mind was still off in la-la land, so he barely noticed.

 _"Chalice of wood, flame within,"_ he said, as though under hypnosis. _"A toad will cow you with a grin. Sherry bottles litter the floor, hidden in a secret store. At Christmas time, a formal dance; beware despair, constant vigilance..."_

He trailed off, and fell out of his chair, snapping him out of the trance.

"My boy, that wasn't very impressive," Trelawney said, clicking her tongue. "Nothing you said made any sense, and it was all very dull. A hearth, something about a toad, a dance, and a warning not to trip on a stair? Very disappointing."

Fully awake now, he glowered at her.

"I suppose you'd be more impressed if I'd said something clearer, like 'On the night of the blue moon, a dragon will eat the headmaster and set the school on fire,' or some rubbish like that? Anyway, whatever. I don't care what I get on this exam, you're useless as a teacher."

He turned to go, but then a loud, harsh voice behind him spoke.

 _"It will happen tonight."_

Al wheeled around. Professor Trelawney had gone rigid in her armchair; her eyes were unfocused and her mouth sagging.

"What?"

But Professor Trelawney didn't seem to hear him. Her eyes started to roll. Al stood there in a panic. She looked as though she was about to have some sort of seizure. He hesitated, thinking of running to the hospital wing — and then Professor Trelawney spoke again, in the same harsh voice, quite unlike her own:

 _"The Dark Lord lies alone and friendless, abandoned by his followers. His servant has been chained these twelve years. Tonight, before midnight … the servant will break free and set out to rejoin his master. The Dark Lord will rise again with his servant's aid, greater and more terrible than ever he was. Tonight … before midnight … the servant … will set out … to rejoin … his master."_

Professor Trelawney's head fell forward onto her chest. She made a grunting sort of noise. Al stood there, staring at her. Then, quite suddenly, Professor Trelawney's head snapped up again.

"I'm so sorry, dear boy," she said dreamily, "the heat of the day, you know … I drifted off for a moment."

Al still stood there, staring at her.

"Is there anything wrong, my dear?"

"You — you just told me that the — the Dark Lord's going to rise again … that his servant's going to go back to him."

Professor Trelawney looked thoroughly startled.

"The Dark Lord? He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? My dear boy, that's hardly something to joke about. … Rise again, indeed —"

"But you just said it! You said the Dark Lord —"

"I think you must have dozed off too, dear!" said Professor Trelawney. "I would certainly not presume to predict anything quite as far-fetched as _that_!"

"But-" Al said.

"Enough of this joking, Mr. Potter," she said, herding him toward the trapdoor. "First you mock my gifts and my teaching all year long, then you feign a vision mocking my—I mean, mocking me, and then you claim I predicted the Dark Lord's return. Honestly, I don't know what game you're playing, but you must go now."

"It's not a game! Listen, I'm sorry for all of the mocking, really, but I think you had a real-"

"GO!" Trelawney shouted at him.

Al gave up on it, and scurried down the ladder fast as he could. Had that been a real prediction? He knew his had been real; he still remembered the images a little, but they were fading, like waking from a dream. But had hers been faked to impress him?

No, he decided. Trelawney's had to be real, too. She had been genuinely put out with him when he told her about it. Al struggled to remember both predictions. His was easier, as it rhymed.

He was so distracted, he walked right past Ron and Hermione, who were trying to catch up to him, still trying to get his attention. But he waved them off. They followed him all the way to the Griffindor dorms, and up to the one he slept in, not talking to him since he'd waved them off, but clearly wanting to. He wrote down his own prediction first, then Trelawney's.

"'Chalice of wood, flame within," Ron read out. "A toad will cow you with a grin. Sherry bottles litter the floor, hidden in a secret store. At Christmas time, a formal dance; beware despair, constant vigilance.' What's this?"

"And this bit here," Hermione said, "about You-Know-Who rising again?"

"I had a real prediction in the test. I think Trelawney did, too. Hers is the Voldemort one."

"You had a vision, mate?" Ron asked, looking amazed. "Tell us!"

"Well, it was the test. I was just staring into the crystal ball, too hot to think, and my brain unfocused, and I started speaking and seeing images. This is pretty much all I remember now, the words. Only I don't know what any of it means. A chalice of wood, flames inside of it? Anything like that would catch fire and burn up."

"Not if it was one of Hermione's waterproof bluebell flames," Ron reminded him. "She actually scooped those up in her hand once and it didn't hurt her. And Lupin has held magical fire in his hand, too."

"Ah. Good point. I'd forgotten that. But what would be the point of a flaming cup?"

Ron shrugged. "Dunno. It'd make a more impressive light than a candle, though. Probably safer, too."

"But what about the other prediction?" Hermione snapped, sounding nervous.

"Oh yeah, after I had my prediction, Trelawney thought it wasn't very impressive. I went off on her a bit, then was about to storm out, when she went all rigid and spoke in this hoarse voice."

"Of all the people to get swept up by her spooky manner," Ron began.

"I know she's usually a fraud, Ron, I spotted it at once. But this time was very different. And she was genuinely annoyed with me later, genuinely thinking I was lying. So I think it was a real prediction!"

Ron looked thoughtful for a moment. "Okay, assuming you're right, do you think this means... Pettigrew?"

"Shit. It probably does. Who else could it possibly mean? We have to get to Dumbledore."

He grabbed the paper, and then paused, and grabbed the two-way mirror as well, but didn't use it right away. He took off downstairs fast as he could, then out the portrait hole and fast-walked in the direction of Dumbledore's office. He'd have run, but he didn't want to be held up by Filch.

The other two huffed and puffed, trying to keep up with Al's larger stride, and when they got to the gargoyle guarding Dumbledore's office, Ron leaned against the wall to catch his breath.

"Listen," he said to the gargoyle, "I don't know what he's changed his password to, but I figure you have some way of getting messages to Dumbledore, so could you please tell Dumbledore that Alastair Potter and friends urgently need to see him?"

The gargoyle nodded, and looked distant for a few moments, before stepping aside to let them onto the magical spiral escalator. Al was so impatient he took the stairs two at a time, getting to the door and opening it before the others were even halfway up.

"Trelawney just had a real prediction," Al said, slamming the parchment down on Dumbledore's desk. "The bottom one, about Voldemort."

Dumbledore didn't question, just read the prediction.

"And you think it was about Peter Pettigrew?"

"Yes. I... wait, you're just accepting my word for this?"

"Sybill may normally be a fraud, but I happen to know she has given at least one other true prophecy before. She would not have gotten the job otherwise. I shall make the necessary calls to find out Pettigrew's status. Please sit down. Ah, you two may sit down as well," Dumbledore said, summoning chairs for Ron and Hermione as they fell into the room, panting.

They gratefully took the seats, but Al was too wired to sit, so he paced around as Dumbledore vanished into the green Floo flames.

A note of uplifting song came from Fawkes the phoenix, from his perch.

"Hi, Fawkes. Thanks for the song, it helps. But I'm still worried. I don't want Pettigrew escaping."

Fawkes' next bit of song sounded like the song equivalent of 'Sure, dude, I understand.'

Al kept pacing. Hermione began to fidget in her seat. Ron was getting antsy, as well. Finally, though, after what felt like an hour, the hearth erupted in green flames. Only, Dumbledore's head was the only thing that appeared in the fire, startling Al and Hermione but not Ron.

"I am going to Azkaban with the minister now, I shall come straight here when I am done. Be well, and try to be patient."

"Okay, okay," Al said, impatient for Dumbledore to find out about Pettigrew. The headmaster nodded, his head disappearing, and the flames going down to nothing.

To take his mind off his worry somewhat, Al got out the two-way mirror and called Sirius on it. Sirius answered, and Al told Sirius all about it.

"Shit," Sirius said. "I hope that little rat is still in his cage."

"Do you think he got out as a rat?"

"Doubt it. I got out because the Ministry didn't know I was an animagus. But they know Pettigrew is one. He's on the registry now, along with me. They have ways of containing animagi. Along with the dementors, Azkaban has other security. Anti-apparition wards. Then too, you can't Floo right to the prison, you have to take a ferry boat. The ferryman is a dementor. And the island has human guards as well."

"Oh?"

"Yes. They're mostly there to keep an eye on the dementors, make sure they don't Kiss anyone without permission. They have short shifts, though; only 4 hours at a time, the place is so bad. And of course, they can't have very many patronuses around without upsetting the dementors and rendering them useless anyway. I think there's a breakroom they go to, to bolster themselves. Anyway, I escaped during one of the many changing of the guards. Then I swam to shore as a dog. But they'll have a spell on Pettigrew to keep him from transforming.

'And then he'll be in a cage a rat can't escape from anyway. No windows in his cell, his food slot too high up to climb as a rat, and designed to only open when food is pushed through. Even if he could get up there, he'd have to squeeze through an opening filled with a food tray, while a dementor was on the other side watching to make sure he didn't get through there."

"Good," Al said, a little relieved but still worried.

"Anyway, as much as I despise the little traitor, I checked up on him a week ago. He hasn't been eating, according to the guards. And given he was losing weight while waiting for me to show up to kill him, I don't think he's going to last the summer."

"You think he's dying?" Al said.

"Yes. It hasn't gotten to the point where the dementors are getting excited, yet. But I don't think it'll be long. I'll be surprised if he makes it to July."

"Dementors get excited when someone's dying?"

"Yeah. Foul dark creatures they are. I'm with Dumbledore, we don't need them guarding our prison. But let's talk of something else, there's no use dwelling on it while we wait for Dumbledore. How about this prediction of yours, eh? You're a seer?"

"I guess," Al said. "It's not a very clear vision, and I don't remember the images anymore, like forgetting a dream."

"Read me the prediction."

Al did so, reading from the paper.

"A wooden chalice with fire in it? For some reason, that sounds familiar. But I can't place it. Leave it for later. A toad will cow you? Does that mean you, Al? Or Trelawney."

"I vaguely remember I was addressing Trelawney at the time. That bit and the sherry bottles was aimed at her. Then it switched back to me. It was addressing me for the wooden chalice part, as well."

"So she's going to be afraid of a toad? I wonder what significance that could possibly have?"

"You got me. Neville brings Trevor in there all the time, and she's never shown any fear of it."

"Hmm... Well, the sherry bottles is plain, at least. Sounds like she's an alcoholic, or will become one."

"Mr. Black?" Hermione said.

"Please, call me Sirius. Mr. Black was my father."

"Sirius, then. Do you think those two things are connected? That being scared of that toad will drive her to drink?"

"Possibly. Still, seems an odd thing to go to drink for. Especially if she's not afraid of Neville's toad."

There was silence, then, as they all thought about it for a bit.

"Anyway," Sirius finally said, breaking the silence, "let's move on. A formal dance at Christmas? I wonder why that would be?"

"Maybe we should buy some formal robes, just in case?"

"Wouldn't hurt to have some around. But formal dances at Christmas time, that's a pureblood tradition. One of the least onerous parts of being a pureblood, in my opinion. Still, I can't imagine going to one. And I can't see why you would be going to one."

"Yeah, and that bit was connected to the next bit," Al said. "'Beware despair, constant vigilance.'"

"Well that second part's fairly obvious, if odd."

"It is?"

"To me, anyway. Those last two words are familiar. I was training to be an auror before your parents died. My mentor was Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody. Old Mad-Eye is infamous for shouting 'Constant vigilance!' all the time. I wonder what that has to do with despair, though? Why warn you to beware despair anyway?"

"I dunno. The whole thing is a mess of mixed up visions. Not sure what a dance has to do with any of it, either. And yeah, the despair thing is weird. And why connect that to Moody? And is that connected to the dance, or is that different?"

"Dunno, pup. But it does sound like advice Moody might give, in the right context." Sirius said.

"Hmm... So we've got some parts that make no sense because we can't work out what they're referring to, or why they're important," Al said, frowning. "I think I need to get tutoring from someone who actually knows a thing or two about divination. I just wish I knew how to find someone like that."

"You could always put an ad in the paper."

"If I did, I wouldn't give my name in the ad, though. Any of the Potters connected to that ad, it'd be bad for me. At the very least, we'd be inundated by more frauds. But how would I get owls, without my name being given?"

"You can have owls sent to a fake name. There are spells for that sort of thing. After all, how do you think owls find people to begin with? They can't know everybody. I don't know the details, but the Gringotts goblins will."

"So I just have to think of a realistic sounding fake name, then."

"Yes. When I left my parents' house, I had to have mail to my name blocked, because mother kept sending howlers, just so I would know how displeased with me she was. I had people start sending me mail by addressing it to Daniel Finnes instead. It's not working anymore, of course, as it's been years, but-"

The hearth roared with green flames, cutting off Sirius's voice from the mirror, and Dumbledore stepped out.

"Yes?" Al asked him anxiously.

"Most curious. Pettigrew is still in his cell. He doesn't appear to be eating at all, and was non-responsive when I spoke to him. He just lay there in the corner, breathing, and occasionally rocking back and forth while holding his knees. He's skin and bones, now. And the dementors..." Dumbledore paused, looking grim and angry.

"...yes?" Al prompted.

"The dementors are getting _excited,_ " Dumbledore said with disgust.

"That means he's dying, then," came Sirius's voice.

"Sirius? Is that you, my boy?"

"Yes, it's me."

"Good. To answer your question, yes. Pettigrew is not long for this world."

There was a sort of shuddering sound from the mirror. Al looked down at it, and Sirius's face looked odd.

"As much as I hate the little rat for betraying us, I'm still losing another friend. I lost him years ago, in one sense. But now I'm losing him in a much more final sense."

"I thought you wanted him dead?" Al asked.

"When I was the only one who knew he was a danger to you, yes, I wanted to kill him to end the threat. I was also a bit deranged from Azkaban, on the run, getting most of my energy from the obsession of stopping him. But you found him out, he's in prison now, and I'm free. I've had time to recover physically, and emotionally a bit as well. And it's not like I can really control my emotions. Emotions are weird, pup."

"I think I understand, Sirius," Al said. "But this is confusing. I still have this gut feeling that the prophecy Trelawney gave is a real one, but it seems like Pettigrew is dying. He can't rejoin his master if he's dead, so I don't understand. Who else could it possibly refer to?"

"A good question, my boy. I wondered the same thing, when I saw Pettigrew's condition. So I had Fudge increase security on the whole prison, in case it meant someone else was escaping. There are many still-loyal followers of Voldemort within those walls."

"Good. I mean, about the increased security. Well, the other thing, too. Let's hope they stay there."

"If it will ease your mind, Alastair, I should like you to do something for me." Dumbledore went over to a cabinet and opened it. Whatever was inside was glowing. He pulled out a... basin. And set it on the desk in front of Al.

Al looked at it. The stone basin was shallow, and covered in runes. Inside the basin was something like gas made into liquid, or liquid that was almost a gas.

"What is that?"

"It is a pensieve. It allows one to put their memories into the basin and watch them from an outside perspective, as well as bringing others into your memories."

Al frowned. "Like Riddle's diary?"

"Yes, something like that. But the pensieve is not alive, like the diary was."

"This could be useful for other things, too. You could give testimony with something like this, show the memories to the wizengamot. They'd have to do it one or two at a time, though."

"Indeed that is true. But for now, I would like you to share your memory of the Divination exam with me."

"How?"

"Take out your wand, put it to your temple like so, concentrate on the memory, and the incantation is 'memoro.'"

Al did as instructed. It took several tries to get it right, but finally a slender thread of gossamer thought clung to his wand like glowing spider silk, and he deposited it in the pensieve.

"Good, Alastair. Now, if you would come into the pensieve with me, please?"

Al nodded. Soon, they were both leaning their faces into the pensieve. Al felt the substance in the basin touch his nose before he pitched forward through darkness, floating into Trelawney's boiling hot classroom. Together, they watched the whole thing, from Al climbing into the room, to the two prophecies, to him scurrying out again. When the memory-Al left the room, Dumbledore pulled him out, and they were in the headmaster's office again.

"Don't worry, we're back."

"You never left. You both just stood there with your noses touching the stuff in the basin."

"Well our minds went into my memory. And I have to say, I don't feel like I know any more than I already did."

"Perhaps not, my boy, but I can now confirm that Trelawney's prophecy was genuine. And yours, too, sounded genuine, but I cannot be sure. Every seer is different, and not all prophecies come true anyway. In fact, most do not."

"They don't?"

"Yes. A prophecy being genuine does not mean it will come true. Divination shows us possible futures. But since we cannot know which possible futures will come true, the number of prophecies that do not come to pass is great. The Ministry has a department that collects prophecies, among other things, and the number of prophecies that have not come to pass – or never did and now never will – is very high."

Al felt something from Hermione, who was oddly quiet for some reason. But at his look, she spoke.

"There are real prophecies? And the Ministry collects them?"

"Yes, Miss Granger, there are indeed real prophecies."

Hermione goggled. "I never believed in divination, especially after Professor McGonagall said it was an imprecise branch of magic."

"And she was correct, my dear. It is indeed imprecise. But so many things in life are, are they not?"

"I guess so."

Al turned to Dumbledore. "You said Trelawney gave one other true prophecy. What was that one? May I see it, for comparison?"

Dumbledore's twinkling eyes dimmed a little at this.

"I... I would rather not, at this time. There may come a time, in the future, when I may. But not now."

"Ah," Al said, putting some things together in his head. "I see. So it's about us, then? Let me guess, something about 'the chorus that sings a song against evil'?"

Dumbledore looked uneasy. He seemed to be weighing things in his mind. This went on for fully two whole minutes before Dumbledore sighed.

"I did not wish to tell you this so soon. You are so young, it is such a burden. But you've already know the gist of it, and you keep bringing it up. Plainly, you are ready."

"Go on," Al prompted.

"Not just yet, my boy. Mr. Weasley, Ms. Granger, I wish to tell him in private."

"I'm just going to tell them later, though."

"Yes, but what I have to say is very grave, and I do not wish to try to explain things with three different people arguing and asking questions. One will be difficult enough. Besides which, you may wish to tell them in your own way."

"Oh, fine then."

Ron and Hermione looked disappointed, but left.

"And I shall know if you are listening at the door, so please go all the way out, maybe into the Great Hall?"

They muttered their understanding and left.

After a couple minutes, Dumbledore smiled in a slightly forced way. "Alright, then. Where to begin? Ah, yes. You asked, before, why Voldemort tried to kill you as a baby, which is relevant now. He tried to kill you, you see, because of a prophecy given before your birth, by Sybill Trelawney."

The headmaster sat down behind his desk to rest. "She was there to interview for the position of Divination teacher, of course. I was rather disinclined to continue the subject, to be honest, given the rarity of true seers, but as she was related to the great seer Cassandra Trelawney, I figured it common courtesy. We met in a pub in Hogsmeade called the Hog's Head – not an ideal place for such meetings, being as it is rather shady, but it was where she was staying at the time. Initially she did not appear to have the gift. I was about to dismiss her when her manner changed, in the same way she did today, and gave a prophecy."

Dumbledore pulled a memory away from his head with his wand, dropped it in the pensieve, and prodded the contents. The contents surged upward and formed the image of the divination teacher looking like she was having a fit. And when Sibyll Trelawney spoke, it was not in her usual ethereal, mystic voice, but in the harsh, hoarse tones Alastair had heard her use once before.

 _"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches. … Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies … and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark_ _Lord knows not_ _…_ _and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives. … The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies."_

There was complete silence, as he sat there, agog at this revelation. Then his face changed to one of concentration and thought.

"One?" Al said. "Not a 'chorus singing a song against evil'?"

"Yes, curious that. I was rather surprised when you mentioned Firenze telling you that. I had never heard its like before. But then, the centaurs are constantly working at divining the future, so they must have gotten more information since this prophecy was made, getting an update as it were. Or perhaps whatever force causes such prophecies to be made thought plural language would be confusing to Voldemort."

"Okay," Al said.

 _What did that mean, though? The prophecy?_

"What does that one bit mean? The bit about 'neither can live while the other survives'?"

"It meant," said Dumbledore, "that the person who has the only chance of conquering Lord Voldemort for good was born at the end of July, nearly fourteen years ago. This boy would be born to parents who had already defied Voldemort three times."

Al nodded. "Okay, this prophecy is interesting and all, but it still doesn't explain why Voldemort tried to kill us."

"Ah, but it does. You see, one of Voldemort's Death Eaters overheard part of the prophecy. He was interrupted and thrown out of the pub before he could hear all of it, though. He relayed what he heard to his master, who acted upon the incomplete information. No doubt he thought it was complete. Acting on an incomplete prophecy, Voldemort did not know that to try to kill you would mean marking you as his equal, thus fulfilling the terms of the prophecy."

"What does that mean, 'mark him as his equal'?"

"As to that, Alastair, it is complicated. It meant that at the time of the prophecy, there were two boys it could have meant – either you or Neville Longbottom – and-"

"So it isn't us?" Al interrupted.

"I'm afraid it is. You see, the final identifying part of the prophecy is that Voldemort would mark him as his equal. Whichever infant he chose would be the one he viewed as a threat, and to Voldemort's mind, only an equal could possibly be a threat.

"He could have chosen Neville, who is a pureblood and therefore more worthy in the ideology that Voldemort professes to follow, but instead he chose the half-blood, like himself. The fact you had black hair possibly helped his decision, too. But either way, he saw himself in you, and so he tried to kill you, which gave you the scar, and also sealed the prophecy to mean you."

There was silence again, as the collective digested this.

"Well," Al finally said, "this explains why I've run into him twice now in three years. We're in the same prophecy together. Still... I don't know if I like this whole prophecy thing. I like to think I have free will, I don't want to be Destiny's hand puppet."

"The existence of prophecies does not mean there is no free will. There are a great many real prophecies made that have never come to pass, many of them will never come to pass now. In fact, if Voldemort had not taken the prophecy seriously, it would not have happened. Because he believed it, however, he made it true."

"So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, then?"

"Correct. So do not blame fate, or Sybill, or the prophecy. Blame Voldemort. For even without the prophecy, if he had killed your parents anyway – seeing as they were frequent thorns in his side – you would still have wanted revenge, correct?"

"Well, as long as the possibility of his coming back to full life and power remains open, then yes, we want to stop him. So many people died in the last war. If he came back, many more would die. Right now he's powerless. If we can find out how he's still alive, and reverse it somehow, we could kill him before he has a chance to kill anyone else. I think even Iliana would be fine with that, since he's such an evil monster."

"Indeed. So we see, Alastair, that the prophecy may have merely given you the tools to defeat him. Beyond the burning need for revenge, you also have the scar to warn you when he is near. And you have parseltongue, which has never been seen in a Potter before, to my knowledge. This is because, as I mentioned in your first year, Voldemort accidentally transferred some of his powers to you when he failed to kill you."

"So, Dumbledore," said an unexpected voice from Dumbledore's desk, startling them both. Al recognized it as Sirius's voice. "do you have any shrewd ideas about what's keeping Voldemort from dying all the way?"

Al picked up the two-way mirror and looked into it.

"Damn, I forgot you were still there. You startled us."

"As to your inquiry, Sirius, I do have some theories. I had something of an inkling years ago, but it was confirmed when Alastair and company found and destroyed Riddle's diary."

"Oh? That has something to do with it?" Al asked.

"Yes. But before I say more, I want your word, Sirius, and the word of the Potter collective, to keep this information to yourselves. You may tell Ron and Hermione if you wish, but nobody else should know."

"Not even Moony?" asked Sirius.

"I will consider allowing him as well. But for now, we shall keep him out of it."

"Understood," said Sirius. "You have my word, I will not tell anyone else."

Dumbledore looked into the mirror as Sirius said this, and must have sensed truthfulness, as he nodded.

"And you, Alastair? Will you and the others keep this information from anyone other than Ron and Hermione?"

"We promise. We swear on our magic to tell nobody but Ron and Hermione, unless you give us permission."

"Good. Now, going on..." Dumbledore cleared his throat, and continued gravely. "You were right about the diary draining Ginny's life force in order to give itself new life. I believe the diary was a magical construct named a horcrux."

"Horcrux? What's that?"

"It is a very powerful and very evil bit of dark magic, wherein one encases a piece of their soul in order to remain earthbound when their body is destroyed. It is something like immortality."

"Encase a piece of your soul? How is that dark magic?"

"Because in order to tear your soul, you must commit premeditated murder. Murder tears the soul apart. A horcrux takes advantage of this damage. There is more to the horcrux process, parts of it that make even premeditated murder pale in comparison." Dumbledore actually shuddered at this.

"And he made one of those?"

"At least one. But I have recent information that indicates Voldemort is still haunting Romania, so apparently he had at least two. Though given how much his appearance had changed when I met him again before the start of the last war, I would wager he made more than two. More, even, than three of them. How many he made, I do not yet know."

"So he murdered at least three people for immortality alone, and murdered or was the ultimate cause of many more people dying?" Al frowned. "He does indeed need being put out of our misery."

"It seems to me, then, Dumbledore," Sirius said from the mirror, "that we need to work out precisely how many of those horrible things he has, and then find them and destroy them."

"Indeed. It will not be easy, though. He has always been very secretive. But I know him well, or at least, much better than most, seeing as I have known him since he was 11, and was his teacher for 7 years. He loves glory, and has a fondness for history. And he is very arrogant. Also, he considers Hogwarts to be his home. He will, I think, be attracted to items connected to the four founders of the school. There have been rumors. And I have been collecting information about Voldemort for many years already. I will start looking over the summer."

"Right," Al said. "In the meantime, let's make sure Pettigrew never escapes. That prophecy has me worried. Can you go check on him again?"

Dumbledore smiled. "I think you meant to ask me if I would watch him tonight, keep guard over him? Which is what I will do. As much as I dislike the dementors, I will gladly endure them for a night to see that this prophecy does not come true."

"Good. Thank you. That helps, knowing that. But I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight."

"Well at least all of your exams are done, my boy."

"Yes, that helps too."

Al didn't tell his friends what Dumbledore had told him, not yet. He wanted to take some time to go through it with the others first before he did, and this is exactly what they did. They indeed could not sleep, so instead they had an internal discussion about it for hours.

They didn't remember going to bed or falling asleep, but found themselves in bed the next morning anyway, still fully clothed. It was lucky they were still in Al's form, and not Adira's, or they might've lost or broken her glasses.

It was a Saturday, and after a groggy breakfast, during which they switched to Adira without meaning to, Ron and Hermione joined them in going down to Hagrid's hut for some tea. Adira briefly contemplated telling them all what Dumbledore had said, or an abridged version, but had a sudden image of a crying Hagrid throwing himself onto her shoulders, and decided against it.

Instead, they discussed Al's prophecy, the one he'd made during the exam.

"Oh, so yer a seer, Al? Never thought anyone would ever get anythin' outta her classes, but I guess yeh proved me wrong on that, eh?"

"Yes," Adira said, smiling. "Nobody was more surprised about it than Al was."

"Hey now, let's see if yeh can do it, too, shall we? I don't got a crystal ball, but this candle flame might do er?" Hagrid said, putting a lit candle down in front of Adira.

"Oh, alright, I'll try it," she said.

She stared at the flame, trying to unfocus her eyes and her brain the way Al had done the other day, but found it difficult, with Zoey singing country-western songs in the back of her mind. Even when she managed to get Zoey to be quiet, however, it just wouldn't happen.

"Maybe it's not warm enough in here?" she thought aloud. "Trelawney's room was boiling hot, with the windows closed and the fire going."

A few minutes later, and Hagrid's hut was warm enough you'd think he'd found another dragon egg. But try as she might, she just couldn't get her brain to unfocus as it had before. Instead, she ended up stepping out of the hut for some cooler air.

"Ah well," Hagrid said, shrugging, when she came back in. "Yeh'll figger it out, I've no doubt about it. Might take yeh a while, but yeh'll do it again."

Adira sighed. "Maybe only Al can do it. Or maybe it's like Trelawney's gift, and has a mind of its own."

"Well at least you've got Al's first one to try to work out the meaning of," Hermione said.

"Yeah, there is that."

"Oh, Adira, did you check with Dumbledore about Pettigrew?" Hermione asked her.

"Yeah, this morning. He was up all night. Pettigrew is still there. Maybe we averted that one?"

"Here's hoping," Ron said, crossing his fingers.

They tried it again every few hours for the rest of the weekend, as well as in spare moments after classes the next week. But try as they might, nothing happened.

It might've been that they were still thinking about what Dumbledore had said. They'd been finding it hard not to think about that, though unlike their normal internal conversations, these thoughts were wordless and passed between one another much faster than usual, so they could have entire wordless conversations in a third of the time as usual. The only downside to this form of communication was that it didn't appear to accomplish anything. It seemed only words could leverage useful changes out of the conversation. Which meant that Tier couldn't really participate. Sure, he _could_ speak, but it was difficult for him.

Perhaps picking up on the frustration this caused, Tier started practicing speaking internally. These words came haltingly, and sounded rough and gravelly even in their head. Whatever it was about Tier that made language difficult for him, it wasn't just the body limiting him, it was something in his mind. Still, by the time exam grades got back to them, it was getting noticeably easier for Tier to speak, inside their mind anyway.

Since it was the last day of term, Adira brought Ron and Hermione into her room and told them, at last, what Dumbledore had said, about the prophecy, about the horcruxes, about Sirius having overheard it, all of it. Their reactions were about what she expected, which made her glad Dumbledore had insisted they not be included in the conversation. There were so many outbursts and questions, she had to insist they take turns speaking, raising their hands like they were in class. But finally, she got the whole thing out, and wearily half-listened as the two of them discussed it for hours and hours.

But finally, it was time to leave for the feast. They went down with the rest of the Griffindors to the Great Hall, and on their way there they spotted Sirius.

"Sirius!" Adira shouted, running to hug him. "What're you doing here?"

"I came to help Moony move his things to his new office, since he quit the Defense position last Friday and is going to be the new History teacher."

"Yeah, he'll be great. I'm glad Dumbledore offered that to him, I like Lupin."

Ron snorted. "Of course he'll be great at it. But a potted plant could be better than Binns, so even if he's horrible at it, he'll still be an improvement."

"I hear Snape wasn't too thrilled about it," Sirius said.

"That's putting it lightly," Adira said.

Ron sighed. "I just wish he could be Defense teacher, though. But I guess the position is cursed, so better safe than sorry. Wonder what they'll give us next year?"

"That's a good question," Sirius said. "Wish I knew. Not a lot of people available for the position."

"Hey Sirius, you should apply for the job!" Adira suggested.

"Me? Defense teacher? Adira, are you trying to get me killed?" Sirius said in mock outrage.

"Er... good point. Better not. Forget I said anything."

Sirius elbowed her playfully. "Nah, no worries. I'd rather not, and I can't imagine what the parents would say if I got the job, even though they ought to know I'm innocent, but I'll apply if Dumbledore can't find anyone else. I used to be in the Order of the Phoenix – Dumbledore's anti-Voldemort group from the first war – so I know a thing or two about Defense. Also, I was one of the top people in my class in Defense. I think only James and Snape got higher grades than me."

At Adira's worried face, he said, "Don't worry. If I take the job, I'll do like Moony did and quit early, just in case."

"Well, okay," she said, somewhat placated.

"Oh, by the way," Sirius said, pulling Ron gently along to a nearby alcove, "I got you something, since it's sort of my fault you don't have a rat anymore. I had another one I was going to give you, but I grew too attached to the feathery little tennis ball, so I got you this one instead."

Sirius pulled from an alcove a cage with an owl in it.

"Long-eared owl, as you can tell by the feathery tufts," Sirius said.

"WOW!" Ron said, taking the cage and staring in amazement at the owl. "Thanks, Sirius!"

As Ron got to know his new owl, Adira asked Sirius if he'd named the little scops owl yet.

"Nah. Nothing's come to me yet. A few names I've tried on him, he didn't take to. But I'll think of something."

After the feast, they boarded the train and took off to London. Adira, Ron, and Hermione got a compartment with Neville and Luna again, where she told them about Al's prophecy. They spent a very enjoyable afternoon discussing what it could mean.

It was difficult, leaving his friends at the train station, but made easier by meeting Sirius there. She could've gone with him on his motorbike straight from Hogwarts, but she'd wanted more time with her friends before saying goodbye, and Sirius understood. He greeted her with a wide grin and handed her a helmet.

"Safety first," Sirius said. "Plus, it's cool looking. I got you one with flames, too, since I'm not sure what else you'd have liked."

She looked at the helmet. It was black with red and orange flames on each side. Then she looked down at the Muggle dress she was wearing.

"Um, not exactly motorbike riding clothes I have on."

"No problem," Sirius said, handing her a bundle of something. "I got you some bike leathers. I still had your measurements from our previous shopping trip, so they should fit. And if not, we have magic. Over here, there's a public loo over on this part of the platform, not many know about it. You can pop into the women's one and get changed there."

Handing the helmet back to Sirius, she went in and got changed. The bike leathers did indeed need a slight adjustment, which Sirius took care of with his wand. When they were done, they left the platform with Adira's stuff, heading for one of the nearby car parks, and when they got there, Sirius put the trunk and Hedwig and her cage into the sidecar.

"Alright, then," Adira said, putting on the helmet.

Sirius put on his helmet and got on; she got on behind him, holding his middle tight.

"Good, you figured that out on your own. Don't worry too much, though. There are charms on the bike keeping us on it. As well as charms to keep it upright, charms to keep us from being hit by cars, and many more."

The visor on Adira's helmet was already down, so she just nodded. Sirius nodded, flipped his own visor down, started the bike with a loud growl that attracted the attention of a few nearby Muggles, and soon they went roaring down the road, Adira laughing with excitement all the way to the pizza parlor.

**END CHAPTER**

End note: Yes, in canon, Trelawney's second prediction was about Peter, but it's not about Peter in this one. You'll probably have guessed some of it, but hopefully I can surprise you a little. :)


	21. Sirius Business

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 21"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-one:** **Sirius Business**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__ _and_ _ _{Tier}.__

 _ _***__ _FAYANORA_ _ _***__

Adira Potter was happy. It was less than two weeks since school got out for the summer, and already the summer was proving to be the best of her life. Sirius – wanting to make up for lost time on both their parts – had been taking her different places. Sure, they ate out a lot when she wasn't teaching Sirius how to cook without burning everything, but more than that. Some days they went to museums of various kinds, other days they would go someplace like the circus or the beach. And every couple days they would go to a public swimming pool of the wizarding sort, in a small building on Diagon Alley, a building which was much, much bigger on the inside than on the outside. They went there specifically to get Adira swimming lessons, since she'd never learned, and it might save her life someday. They even went to a rock concert, Adira's first ever.

Of course, they couldn't be out all the time. When they were home, since wizards didn't have televisions (something Adira made a mental note to work out how to invent, since wizards had their own version of radio), Sirius would tell her Marauder stories, or teach her Animagus stuff. They didn't need to worry about homework; Adira had done all her summer homework on the first weekend at home, so she wouldn't have to worry about it.

Today was really special, though. It was July 1st, and she woke with excitement at what would be happening that day. She was so excited that she woke before Sirius did. He was sleeping as a dog at the end of her bed again, having had more nightmares. She was very quiet so as to not wake him, and changed her clothes in the bathroom before heading down to the kitchen to start breakfast.

Humming happily, the happiest she'd ever been while cooking, she was almost done when she heard Sirius as Padfoot come into the room, sniffing eagerly at the bacon and eggs she was making.

"No animal forms at the table, Sirius," she scolded.

Padfoot whined, but then Sirius changed back to his human form. He was already dressed.

"So you got up, became human, and got dressed before coming down as a dog again?" she asked.

Sirius started taking some bacon off the plate. "Yes. I can smell pretty well as a human, too, but your cooking smells so much better in my dog form. I mean, it smells great either way. Just... it's a richer, stronger smell as a dog."

"That makes sense." Adira sat down and started making herself an egg and bacon sandwich with tomatoes and lettuce.

"A BLTE, then?" Sirius asked, referring to her sandwich.

"Sure, I guess. Al prefers to call it a BELT, though."

"Probably because if you eat enough of them, your belt stretches. Or it would if I ate them, anyway."

Adira nodded absently, digging into her food.

"So today's the big day. You excited?"

Her mouth full of food, Adira gave him the thumbs up.

"Good. It took me enough work to convince them to do it. They don't normally let minors do it, you know. But between the evidence, and Dumbledore and I both pressuring them, they gave in. Sure, they've made exceptions before, but it's still something to be excited about. Well, for you it would be."

"Mm-hmm," she agreed.

" Also, you already did the normally hard work, this would just be recognition of that."

"Quite."

"So I was wondering if you'd given any more thought to letting me pay for it. I am your guardian after all. You should save the money in your trust vault for school, since you can't access the other vault until you turn 17, and that's still over three years away, pup."

She swallowed, took a drink of her pumpkin juice before answering. "Well, yes. And... you make a good point. So, okay; you can pay for it, then."

"Good. I mean, I know it isn't much – only 40 galleons – but still, my vault can handle that better than yours can, for now. Plus, now I'm getting reparations from the Ministry for false imprisonment."

"Oh really? How much is it?"

"It's over 1000 galleons per month for at least the next 10 years. _And_ I heard Crouch is losing his job over it. No idea where he's going to get work now that the Ministry won't employ him. Not that I really care, mind, except out of malicious curiosity."

"What about Dumbledore? I mean, he's the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, he could've at least tried to get you a trial. I mean, he knew you fairly well."

"Ah, yes. That. Well, you're not wrong. Apparently he got Snape off, and Snape was actually a Death Eater before turning traitor on them for some reason. So I did ask him about it, naturally."

"Between the shouting, I'm sure."

"Exactly. The point was made, though."

"What was his excuse?"

"His excuse was that he knew there was a traitor close to Lily and James. Given that I was supposed to be the Secret Keeper, I was the obvious choice for who the traitor was."

"But all they found of Pettigrew was a finger. They find a finger, assume he's blown up, and don't look any farther?"

"As to that, it was a mess. The sewer had been blasted open, there was... well... _stuff_ everywhere. Muggles were in a panic. They had to clean it up fast, or risk the magical world being exposed. So that much makes sense. They assumed most of his body ended up in the sewer or had been Vanished during the cleaning process, and the details got lost in all the chaos.

"Still," he went on, "that doesn't excuse not even questioning me. Granted, veritaserum was not very reliable until after I was already in prison, when someone perfected the recipe. I guess I might still have been disbelieved by most. But Dumbledore would have believed me. As I said, though, they didn't question me. Dumbledore says he was told that I _was_ questioned, though. That seemed to be enough for him." Sirius glowered at his plate.

"Sirius?"

Her godfather sighed. "I'm not happy about it, but he did apologize, and I believe his apology was genuine. Still, I refused to accept his apology. My exact words were 'Your apology is heard.' Mind you, I'm not going to let this stop me from working with the man. But a lot of the trust that was there before is gone now."

"I know how you feel. He was much the same way about the Dursleys."

"Gods, the Dursleys. I don't know about you, but I can't forgive him for that, either. Lily and James wouldn't have wanted you to go to them even if every other witch and wizard in the whole world died first. When Dumbledore finally dies, he's going to have a pair of very angry people waiting to kick his arse over that."

"I hope so," Adira said.

"Oh, by the way, have you gotten the news yet? Pettigrew died in prison a couple days ago."

"Yeah, I read about that. I'm amazed he hung on for as long as he did. He stopped eating almost two whole weeks before he finally died."

"Yes, that was quite amazing. As soon as I heard Dumbledore say the dementors were getting excited, I thought for sure it'd be just two or three days before he died."

Adira stood up then, done with her meal. She set the dishes to washing themselves with her wand, something she knew she could do since Sirius had informed her that the rule against using magic couldn't be enforced in households with magical adults living there. She was glad for this, because she wanted to practice dueling at some point.

"Well I'm done too, pup," Sirius said, setting his own dishes to washing themselves, too.

"Shall we go now?"

"Not quite yet, Adira."

A few minutes later, they both had everything they needed for the trip. They were going by Floo, rather than by motorbike, mainly because there wasn't anywhere to really park by the Ministry. The Ministry had its own vehicles, and thus its own garage, but only certain Ministry workers had access to that. So Floo it was.

"Ministry of Magic," Sirius said, going ahead of her into the green flames.

When the flames went back to normal, Adira took a pinch of Floo Powder and tossed it in. "Ministry of Magic," she said, once she got into the flames.

She spun around, whooshing through a dark tunnel past myriad hearths, until she tumbled out in a heap onto a floor of shiny dark stone. Taking her wand out, she stood up at attention, looking for danger. All she saw instead was Sirius smiling, and many many witches and wizards coming out of other fires. She stowed her wand.

"Moody would be proud, pup."

"He would?" she asked. "What's he like, anyway?"

"Oh Moody? He's pretty intense. But he's a good man. Kind in his own way, even though he's abrupt, and practically the living incarnation of paranoia."

Adira nodded, looking absently around her. They were standing at one end of a very long and splendid hall with a highly polished, dark wood floor. The peacock-blue ceiling was inlaid with gleaming golden symbols that were continually moving and changing like some enormous heavenly notice board. The walls on each side were paneled in shiny dark wood and had many gilded fireplaces set into them. Every few seconds a witch or wizard would emerge from one of the left-hand fireplaces with a soft _whoosh_ ; on the right-hand side, short queues of wizards and witches were forming before each fireplace, waiting to depart.

Halfway down the hall was a fountain. A group of golden statues, larger than life-size, stood in the middle of a circular pool. Tallest of them all was a noble-looking wizard with his wand pointing straight up in the air. Grouped around him were a beautiful witch, a centaur, a goblin, and a house-elf. The last three were all looking adoringly up at the witch and wizard, which was only believable in the case of the house elf. Glittering jets of water were flying from the ends of the two wands, the point of the centaur's arrow, the tip of the goblin's hat, and each of the house-elf's ears, so that the tinkling hiss of falling water was added to the pops and cracks of Apparators and the clatter of footsteps as hundreds of witches and wizards, most of whom were wearing glum, early-morning looks, strode toward a set of golden gates at the far end of the hall.

"This way, Adira."

They joined the throng, wending their way between the Ministry workers, some of whom were carrying tottering piles of parchment, others battered briefcases, still others reading the _Daily Prophet_ as they walked. As they passed the fountain, Adira saw silver Sickles and bronze Knuts glinting up at her from the bottom of the pool. A small, smudged sign beside it read:

 _All proceeds from_ _the Fountain of_ _Magical Brethren will be_ _given_ _to_

 _St. Mungo's Hospital_ _for Magical Maladies and Injuries_

She dug through her coin purse quickly and tossed a galleon into it, glad to share her wealth with people in need. Which got her thinking, and realizing she'd never seen a homeless witch or wizard, that she knew of.

"Where do homeless witches and wizards go to beg for money?"

"Homeless witches or wizards?" Sirius responded. "I don't know. I'm not sure they exist."

"If poor people like the Weasleys exist, surely those who are worse off also exist. I mean, the Weasleys may be poor, but at least they own property, and they never go hungry. I mean, it would be great to find out that nobody in the wizarding world goes without food or shelter or clothing, but I highly doubt such is the case."

"I honestly don't know. I guess it's a sign of how I grew up that it never occurred to me to look into it, but you have a point. Something for you to look into, then. But first, we need to go over here to the security wizard kiosk."

They stepped out of the stream of Ministry employees heading for the golden gates, toward a desk on the left, over which hung a sign saying SECURITY. A badly shaven wizard in peacock-blue robes looked up as they approached and put down his _Daily Prophet._

"Hi there, Eric. I'm escorting a visitor," Sirius said.

"Why didn't you come through the visitor's entrance, then?"

"Oh. I forgot about that. Sorry. Should we leave and come back that way?"

"No," the wizard said in a bored voice. "Just try to remember it next time."

"That I will."

"Good. Now step over here, please."

Adira walked closer to him and the wizard held up a long golden rod, thin and flexible as a car aerial, and passed it up and down her front and back.

"Wand," grunted the security wizard at Adira, putting down the golden instrument and holding out his hand.

Adira produced her wand. The wizard dropped it onto a strange brass instrument, which looked something like a set of scales with only one dish. It began to vibrate. A narrow strip of parchment came speeding out of a slit in the base. The wizard tore this off and read the writing upon it.

"Eleven inches, phoenix-feather core, been in use almost four years. That correct?"

"Yes," said Adira.

"I keep this," said the wizard, impaling the slip of parchment on a small brass spike. "You get this back," he added, thrusting the wand at Adira.

"Thank you."

"Hang on. …" said the wizard slowly. He was staring at her scar, and her appearance, and putting things together.

"Thanks a bunch, Eric," Sirius said, steering her away from the security wizard.

When they were away, Adira sighed. "Thanks for that, Sirius."

"No problem, Addy," he said, ignoring her half-hearted glare.

Sirius lead them over to a golden, grilled lift. Its door rattled open, and they walked in. Adira looked up curiously at many differently-colored paper airplanes that floated into the lift with them.

"Inter-departmental memos, according to Arthur Weasley," Sirius said. "He was with me on one of my first trips back here. They used to use owls, I think. The mess got to be too much, so they switched to those, instead."

"Ick," she said.

The lift was slow and tedious, especially since they were many levels above the one they needed to go to. A cool female voice spoke at each floor, saying what each level was.

"Does that voice always speak the floors? I imagine if I worked here, that would drive me mad before long."

"I don't know, pup."

After what seemed an age, they finally made it to level two, which was dedicated to magical law enforcement.

"There are other offices down here the voice didn't cover," Sirius explained. "Such as the Marriage Certification Office and, of course, the one we need, the Office For Changes To Legal Statuses."

They found an information kiosk down there, Sirius stopping there.

"Hello," said the witch at the desk. "How may I help you?"

"Sirius Black escorting Adira Potter to get an official name change."

"Sirius Black!" The woman said, alarmed. But then she seemed to remember he was innocent, for she said, "Oh yes, I recall now. Sorry. Anyway... Adira Potter? Who is that?" she asked, looking in confusion at Adira, until she saw Adira's scar. "Oh. You mean Harry-"

"That is her current legal name, yes. She's here for a name change and to change her gender marker on the Ministry's official forms," Sirius said in a growl.

"Y-yes. Right. Name change. Yes. Well, you'll need Identity Paperwork Services. Down this hall, last door at the end."

"Thank you," Sirius said with a frown.

Adira followed Sirius down the corridor, finally starting to feel nervous.

"Sirius, what is this going to entail?"

"Probably a lot of paperwork, forms to fill out. After that, I don't know."

"You don't know? Why didn't you find out before we came here?"

"To be honest, I did. But, er... I forgot most of it. My memory hasn't been quite the same since Azkaban, sorry."

"You don't need to apologize to me, it's not your fault."

"That may be so, but I guess I should try harder to compensate for it. Carry a notepad around, write everything down, or something like that."

When they finally got there, they faced a short, fat, bald man with very thick glasses sitting on a tall chair behind a desk. He looked up from his work at them, squinting over his glasses.

"Sirius Black-" Sirius started, interrupted by the wizard's squeak of terror. Sirius massaged his forehead as though praying for patience.

"Falsely imprisoned and finally pardoned Sirius Black," Sirius started over, "here escorting my god-daughter, who needs to change her legal name and gender on the Ministry's official forms."

"R-right," said the fat wizard. "Current legal name?"

"Harry James Potter," Adira said.

" _The_ Harry Potter?"

Adira sighed. "Yes. The Harry Potter who survived the killing curse, thanks to the sacrifice of my mother. Now can we get on with this, please?"

"Of course, of course. Sorry, just never met anyone famous before. Except some of the people who work here, of course. Okay, let me just pull up your file."

With a wave of his wand, the short wizard summoned "Harry's" file. A metal filing cabinet in the back opened up, the drawer inside sticking out impossibly long, their file poking up from among the others, which the wizard took. Adira looked at the man's nametag as he did this. The tag said 'Mortimer Theophilus Cavendish, Undersecretary of Records.'

The man took out their file and looked through it.

"So you'd like to change your name and gender marker, then?"

"Yes," Adira said. "What all will this entail?"

"Well, you fill out some forms, then submit them. Submission fee for the name change is 100 galleons; for the gender marker change, another 50 galleons. The fees cover the cost of the forms, and the cost of the labor involved. For the gender marker, you'll have to submit to a scan by our resident medi-witch.

"Then, somewhere between one to three weeks, you'll have to return to have a meeting with a member of the wizengamot, who will determine whether or not to grant the requested changes. If granted, there are a series of rituals and blood seals required to make the changes to the forms and all the official magics connected to your legal name. Some others, like the Book at Hogwarts that records the names of magical children, will automatically update themselves at that point. But you'll have to go to Gringott's with a copy of the magical seal from the Ministry, because the goblins have their own ways of doing things, their own rituals and blood seals."

"Hold on a moment," Sirius said, summoning parchment from nowhere. "Do you have a quill and ink I can borrow, to write all this down and fill the forms out with?"

"Yes," the short wizard said, pointing at a bedraggled quill in an inkpot at the end of the desk. "It's magically bound to this room, so it can't be removed. But you can move it anywhere within this room. There are desks over there you can use to fill out the forms."

"Thank you. Now, I just have to write this all down. I forgot to last time," Sirius said, rapidly scratching out notes, his tongue sticking out of his mouth in concentration.

"What do the rituals entail?"

"Nothing onerous. Some runes painted onto the skin, standing in a circle of runes. The blood seals are just magical parchments requiring a small blood sacrifice – just a pinprick's worth apiece – to activate. Also, you have to promise on your magic that you want the changes, and that you aren't being coerced."

"Why do I need to be scanned by a medi-witch?"

"That's for the gender marker change. It verifies that you've either undergone the proper sex change spells and potions, or that there was a mistake in the paperwork from the start."

"I, uh... I managed to change my sex with my own unique magic, without potions or spells. It was a complete transformation. Will that change the results?"

"If it is a complete transformation, then no matter how unique the cause, it should be fine. I can't think of any way for it to not be."

"Er... as to that... I'm actually a bunch of different people in the same body. Two of them are male. Is that...? I mean..."

"It's the anatomy of the body at the time of the scan that counts. The scan does check for use of Polyjuice Potion, but if you're not using that, then there shouldn't be a problem."

"Oh," she said, not completely satisfied, but not wanting to admit to having used Polyjuice before, to ease her mind by asking if it could detect past usage of the potion.

This Mortimer Cavendish fellow must be pretty astute, though, because he gave her a knowing look and said, "It only detects if Polyjuice Potion is being used at the time of the scan, mind; it doesn't detect past use of the potion. I don't think there's anything, spell or potion, that can detect something like that."

"Oh, er... that would be good to know, if I'd ever used it in the past. Which I haven't."

"Mmm... well if you had, it wouldn't be part of my job to find out, or to care one way or the other, Ms. Potter."

"Sorry, can you repeat some of that earlier stuff, from before Adira started asking you questions? I think half of it slipped my mind, and I want to make sure I get it all. Twelve years falsely imprisoned, my memory isn't quite what it used to be, you know."

Looking sympathetic, Mortimer Cavendish repeated the information for Sirius, making sure he stopped writing before assuming he was done.

"All done? Good. Any other questions before I fetch the paperwork?"

They looked at each other and shrugged.

"Good, good."

With another wave of his wand, several enormous piles of parchments flew over to them. He began explaining them all one by one to an increasingly bewildered Sirius. Adira and other others tried keeping up with it all, but soon felt the man's words gum up the works of their shared mind like treacle in the gears.

Adira helped Sirius lug the piles of parchments over to a pair of desks, where they spent the next several hours poring through them, arguing over the meanings of the things asked in them and what to write down, arguing with Mortimer about these things many times. Adira was getting a massive stress headache; this seemed to be common, for Mortimer had vials of headache cure potions in a small cupboard behind his desk, and handed one to each of them.

By the time they finished, and Mortimer read through the forms to make sure everything was in order, they signed their current legal names to each, in about a dozen different places. Some of these, they had to suffer while Mortimer read out several pages of information he was required by law to read to them first. More headache cure potions were downed. Adira had to resist the urge to vanish Inside.

"Good," Mortimer finally said, with an air of finality. "Now all that's left is payment, and then the scan by the medi-witch. Her first available appointment time today is at six PM."

"What time is it now?" Sirius asked, too exhausted to check for himself. He was pulling gold out of his coin purse, staring at galleons as if he'd forgotten how to count.

The bureaucrat checked a pocket watch. "It is half past noon."

"Of what day?" Adira felt Al ask with her voice. "Feels like we've been here at least a week."

Mortimer chuckled. "Same day, I'm afraid. You've been here for only four hours, believe it or not."

"You sure this room isn't hooked up to a Time Turner?" Adira asked.

The man chuckled again. "Quite sure, my dear, quite sure. Shall I put you down for six PM, then?"

Adira and Sirius looked at each other.

"Yes," Adira finally answered.

"Good, good. Do try to not be late, Madam Codsworth doesn't like it when people are late."

"We'll be here early," she said. "Come, Sirius, let's get lunch somewhere."

"I vote for the Leaky Cauldron. There's a room there where you can rent a couch to take a nap for an hour or two. My brain feels like it's been run through about ten years worth of marathons, then through a meat grinder."

"I know the feeling," Adira agreed.

"Ahem!" Mortimer said. They turned back to him.

"You forgot to pay. It's 150 galleons total."

Sirius stared again at the money. Then he put it back, and dug around in his robes for something. Finally, he pulled out an oddly shaped piece of parchment.

"You take promissory notes?"

"Sure thing."

They stood there for several long minutes more as Sirius struggled to bully his brain into filling out the Gringott's Money Order. But finally, all that remained was pricking his finger and wiping a smear of his blood on the middle of a rune circle on the parchment, which instantly transported the note back to Gringott's. A few moments later, another paper came back, a different one, which confirmed that the required amount of gold had been transferred to the Ministry's coffers from Sirius's account.

"Well that's all in order, then. Enjoy your lunch, and see you again at six!" Mortimer Cavendish said brightly.

"Uh huh," they said with exhaustion, slowly dragging their bodies along to leave the Ministry.

When they got to the Leaky Cauldron, the barman, Tom, watched them try to figure out money. He waved them off.

"Never mind, Sirius, I'll put it on your tab. Will you be taking your nap before or after your meal?"

"Before, I think. I doubt either of us can figure out silverware in this state," Adira said.

"Right, then. This way."

A couple hours later, they woke up feeling much better. Less than a minute after waking up on their separate couches, Tom walked in with two large bowls of steaming hot stew. A teenage witch followed Tom with a couple bottles of butterbeer for them floating in the air at the behest of her wand.

"Thank you, Tom, Esmeralda," Sirius said to them.

Still groggy from their nap, and very hungry, they ate in silence and were quickly done. Once they'd cleaned up and gotten ready, Sirius took Adira's arm and took her by the underground to the visitor's entrance of the Ministry, which was a magical phone booth that took them down to the Ministry once they punched the right number and identified themselves. Once they got through, they went through security, then down into Mortimer's office.

"Ah, there you are. Madam Codsworth will be with you soon."

They sat there, waiting. Ten minutes later, a stern-looking grey-haired medi-witch with a beak-like nose bustled out.

"Adira Potter?" she called.

"Here," Adira said.

"This way."

Adira came into a very small room and sat down at the hospital bed. Sirius came in for moral support, and sat on one of only two chairs.

"So, you are changing your name and sex status, are you?"

"Yes."

"Sit down," the woman said unnecessarily, as Adira was already seated.

The medi-witch used her wand to scan Adira, like Madam Pomfrey had years ago after their first transformation into Iliana. She did all this silently, with a manner that suggested that no talking would be permitted until the scans were done.

"Very unusual," Madam Codsworth finally said.

"Yes?" Adira asked.

"It's just, there are some things here I can't make any sense of, in your magic."

Adira sighed. She had a suspicion what she was going to have to do.

"What have you heard about me before, Madam?"

"You? Absolutely nothing. Why?"

"My birth name is Harry Potter, Madam."

The woman blinked. "The Bo—er... the er, the Child Who Lived?"

"Yes. But what else have you heard?"

"Nothing at all, as I said. Why?"

"Well, this may explain something. Zoey?"

With no glow at all this time, Adira shrunk down into the younger form of Zoey. The older woman jumped back in shock.

"What the name of Merlin...?"

"Hiya, Lady! I'm Zoey Potter. I'm one of at least five different people-" she held up five fingers as though showing her age "-that live in this body. Adira is the one who used to be known as Harry. She thought she was a boy. Now she's a girl."

The medi-witch was silent, shocked still. But it was plain the gears were beginning to whirr in her mind.

"You are not a metamorphmagus, I know that much. Tell me, did Adira use... whatever magic this is... to change her body as you others do?"

"Right on the nosey, Lady!"

Madam Codsworth began to compose herself at last, brushing imaginary dust off her skirt.

"Right. Well that's that question answered. Am I correct in assuming you have been scanned like this before?"

"Yes. How'd ya know?"

"People usually ask a lot more questions during this process. Adira barely spoke. And I would assume, if you transfigured yourself like this at school, the school would wish to know what is going on."

"You're right, of course. Hold on, Adira wants to come back."

Again with no glow, Zoey shot back up to Adira's form.

"Sorry for that shock. But it was faster than trying to explain first. You might not have believed me."

"Quite right, Ms. Potter. Good call."

"Shall we go on?"

"No no, I have everything I need. You have undergone a more complete transformation than our best potions and spells can do for most transgender persons. We can get them to be able to, er... to be fertile in their new forms. But it takes monthly supplemental potions to maintain, and for the trans women, pregnancy can be quite difficult. Many only manage it once, safely. You, however... you could probably have as many children as the Weasleys, if you wanted."

Adira blushed. "It's much too early for me to be thinking about _that_ ," she said.

"Not really. You could get pregnant now if you wished. Not that you should. In fact, I bring this up because many witches and wizards your age become sexually active. If you should do so, you should learn about safe sex. I believe Hogwarts provides prophylactics for both boys and girls. Admittedly, I am unsure how most of them would work on you. You may wish to speak with someone at St. Mungo's about that. For now, here are some pamphlets on the subject."

As she took the pamphlets, red with embarrassment, she noticed Sirius was looking just the same. He noticed her looking, but said nothing.

"Thank you, Madam."

"You're welcome. And Miss?"

"Yes?"

Madam Codsworth actually smiled slightly. "Good luck. Though personally, I doubt you will need it, with my testimony."

"Thank you."

She escorted them out of the room and saw them off with a sharp nod. They waved goodbye to her and Mortimer, taking the dull journey back up to the main room of the ministry before returning home by Floo.

To take her mind off the upcoming interview with the wizengamot representative about approving her name and gender change, she did a lot of reading about the animagus process. It involved a lot of meditation and a lot of advanced learning about transfiguration theory, and was all very confusing and frustrating. Meditation was hard because it was hard to coordinate the different minds to all be quiet at once. When she expressed this frustration to Sirius, he chuckled and explained that you don't have to cease thinking in meditation, you just have to try to stop _purposefully_ thinking.

"Think of it like this," he'd said, "you're always gonna get random thoughts popping up, even us singletons have that issue. Just silently acknowledge the fact that they exist and then ignore them. Try not to engage those thoughts. Let them wash over you like bits of stuff in the surf, let them move on past you. You are not your thoughts, you are not even the thinker; you are the observer."

Adira was glad for this advice, which made meditation a little easier. But her mind was still too distracted, given the thing she was concerned about on the horizon of her future. Then, too, Zoey got bored a lot more easily than she did, and would start singing random songs in their mind, which was too difficult to ignore for long, and often ended with Al sending Zoey images of him tying her to a chair and gagging her with a sock, at which point Zoey would pick the most annoying song she could think of and sing it even louder within their shared mental space, until Al started to "chase" her around, then all hope of meditating would be lost.

Then, the advanced transfiguration work felt like being at school again. Many of the books had practical exercises that were heavily recommended to do before reading on, exercises which were especially difficult. Sirius would occasionally quiz her on what she'd read so far, and assign her work if she got too many of the questions wrong. Adira had taken to calling him "Professor Black" when she got into tetchy moods after these quizes.

There was also a potion involved, that would reveal one's animagus form. It was highly complex; even Iliana was having a hard time understanding enough of how it worked to even begin risking brewing the preliminary parts, and half the time she melted her cauldron. It was very good for her that she'd worked out a way of repairing melted cauldrons, assuming they weren't completely melted. Plus, the cauldron was pewter, so occasionally she had to collect the melted metal, purify the potions ingredients from the melted metal, and re-cast a new cauldron.

They got an unexpected visit a fortnight after their visit to the Ministry. It started with Errol – the Weasley family's old and battered owl – hitting the window of Adira's bedroom and slumping onto the sill, having been knocked out. Adira opened the window and gingerly set the elderly owl down on her bed, taking the letter from him. He was still out cold, so she would wait to try to feed or water him.

She looked at the letter. It was from Ron.

 _Dear Adira or whichever of you gets this,_

 _I'm writing because Ginny has been kinda weird lately, sorta down and thoughtful. I asked her about it, and she wants to know if she can come over to your house today. I figured I'd come too, if you let us, because I'm curious what the place is like. I think she wanted to talk to Adira specifically about whatever's bothering her. What d'ya say? Send me an answer back with Hedwig, I don't think Errol is up to more than one trip today, and I kinda need a response ASAP._

 _See you soon, I hope;_

 _-Ron_

Adira set her books aside and got up to run to Sirius, who was writing a letter to somebody. He looked up when she came into the room.

"Ron wants to know if he and Ginny can come over today. Can they? It sounded like Ginny really needed to talk about something with me."

"Sure thing, Addy," Sirius said with a smirk. Adira rolled her eyes.

"You know I hate that nickname."

He shrugged. "Lots of kids get nicknames they don't like from their parents. Think of it as part of the godparent/godchild experience."

"Whatever. So I can write him back?"

"Nah, owls take forever. Here, let me show you something," he said, leading her to the living room with the hearth.

"What...?"

"Watch."

He took a pinch of Floo powder, threw it in the fire. The fire turned green, and he got down on all fours and put his head in the fire.

"The Burrow!" he shouted.

Suddenly, his head disappeared, and Adira nearly screamed, but his body hadn't collapsed, so she thought he probably wasn't dead. She still worried, though, until he pulled his head back out of the fire and stepped away from the hearth.

"That's called a Fire Call. I didn't scare you, did I?"

"A little. It was shocking seeing your head fly off your body. Did that hurt?"

"Nope. A little uncomfortable kneeling by the fire, but... oh, this must be them."

The fire, which had gone back to normal, had turned green again. Two redheads – Ron and Ginny – tumbled out of the fire and hit the wards, which shimmered briefly from the impact. Sirius did the things necessary to let them through the wards, and they stepped through gratefully, brushing ash off their clothes.

"Oh good, Adira's here already," Ron said.

Ginny was looking around at the huge room. It suddenly dawned on Adira that Ginny might not have ever seen any place quite so swanky as this. She felt uncomfortable; while the house was Sirius's, not hers, she had never liked feeling like she was flaunting her wealth, and this was flaunting by proxy.

Whatever Ginny wanted to talk about, she didn't want to say right away. Adira even offered to find them a private room, but she wasn't fully psyched up to whatever it was yet, so Adira took the two Weasleys on a tour of the place instead. It was a little awkward of course, but Ron was suitably impressed, which helped ease tensions a little.

The tour over, they went to the drawing room and all sat down. Adira kept looking at Ginny, who was looking more uncomfortable. Ron looked at the two girls in turn, and after a few minutes, he coughed politely.

"Well, I need some water," he said lamely. "I'll just go get some in the kitchen, okay."

"If you're hungry, feel free to make a sandwich," Adira told Ron. He nodded and left the room.

After another awkward space of time, Adira decided to ask.

"Ginny, what-"

"I'm sorry, Adira."

Adira blinked.

"Sorry? About what?"

"When you came out as trans to me. I'm sorry I didn't take it well. I... I was a selfish, stupid little girl with a crush, and never really tried to get to know you as a person. I was attracted to _what_ you were – that being the Boy Who Lived – and not _who_ you were, and that was wrong. I'm sorry."

Adira relaxed, and smiled. "Apology heard and accepted, Ginny. That had to have been a shock to you."

"Yes, it was. Which also annoys me. The twins weren't even surprised, from what I hear. I mean, they didn't know, not really. But they knew something was different."

"In fairness to you, the twins and I talk a lot more than you and I do."

"Yeah, I know. Because I kept getting nervous around you, due to my crush on you. But, well... I want to get to know you for who you are, maybe be a friend. If you're okay with that."

"I love having friends. The more the merrier. Especially with all the people at school who think I'm an attention-seeking nutter."

"Cool. I mean, cool about us trying to be friends. I don't think you're any kind of a nutter," she said, blushing. "So, er... how's your summer been so far?"

Adira smiled. She _had_ been wanting someone else to talk about things with. Sirius was all well and good, but there were some things you didn't tell a parent or godfather. The fact she kinda had two dads – Sirius and Hagrid – didn't really change that. Sometimes you just need a girl friend. And Hermione... she wasn't all that girly. Ginny had her boyish aspects, but she did seem like a better fit for this kind of friend.

"Oh, it's been interesting," Adira said, to buy time while she thought about how much she wanted to tell Ginny, and what, this soon in their friendship. "The best summer yet, I'd say. Hanging out at the burrow was fun and all, and I still want to visit sometime, but having a home that's my own, through Sirius, feels good. We eat out a lot, because Sirius never learned to cook for himself before his false imprisonment. I've been trying to teach him, but there's only so many fires you can put out in a week before it gets tiresome."

Ginny laughed. "Maybe I can convince Mum to come over sometime and help out trying to teach him. I can just imagine what Mum would say if she found out that you two only ever ate homecooked meals when you were making it. She'd say it's not right, the child doing the cooking for the adult."

"Yeah, that's pretty much Sirius's concern, too. It's part of why I'm teaching him. He is getting better, though. The other day he managed to boil some eggs without starting a fire."

They talked of this and that for a while, until finally Adira felt she could bring the conversation over to something she had really wanted to talk about. She told Ginny all about the story of going to fill out the forms and get the scan for changing her name and gender marker.

"Hmm..." Ginny said, her expression reminding Adira of Mrs. Weasley.

"What?"

"Oh, it's just... why do they need to scan you to get your gender changed in their records? If there's one thing this has taught me, is that your gender is in your head, not between your legs. They should just take your word for it."

Adira looked thoughtful. "Wow. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that, but what if I hadn't taken any of the potions or spells for a sex change? What if my worries had been founded, and they hadn't worked on me, and I hadn't been able to do it myself? I'd still have the, er, stuff down there. If that didn't match what they were looking for, would they even make an exception for me?"

"Exactly. And from what you said, making the transition puts most people in the position of becoming dependent on potions for the rest of their life. What if someone didn't want that? Or couldn't afford the potions? Why couldn't they just be whatever gender without actually having to do something about it?"

"Yeah..." Adira said, sitting there thinking. "Good points..."

Just then, the tiny feathery tennis ball that was Sirius's owl came into the room hooting and flying around like an excited, oversized bumblebee. Adira swatted half-heartedly at it, but Ginny giggled at its antics.

"What an adorable owl! What's her name?"

"His name. I think. I'm not actually sure how owl sexes work, but Sirius calls him a he. And he doesn't have a name yet."

"Can I give him a name?"

"I guess so. You'd have to ask Sirius."

"Ask me what?" said Sirius from the doorway. "Don't worry, I wasn't listening. I was looking for the owl."

"Can I name him, Sirius?"

"Sure, why not? I haven't thought of a name for him."

"Hmm... how about Pigwidgeon?"

The owl twittered around happily, now it had a name. Sirius sighed and rolled his eyes.

"Pigwidgeon it is, then. Come on, you feathery git, I have a letter for you."

They watched Sirius grab the tiny owl out of the air and head out the room with him. Ginny turned back to Adira.

"I'm glad we had this chat. I like talking with you. I can't believe how ridiculous I've been about you in the past."

Adira shrugged. "Yeah, well... I get it. I mean, if I had to try talking to some of the people I've taken a fancy to..." she stopped, turning red.

Ginny sat up more and looked very interested all of a sudden. "Ooooh, you fancy someone? Who?"

Adira shook her head.

"Come on, I can keep a secret."

"I... you'll laugh. Or something."

"I won't."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

She hesitated.

"Oh, fine then. I... do you know who Cho Chang is?"

"The Ravenclaw seeker?" Ginny said, looking momentarily jealous, before shaking it off and looking thoughtful. "Yes, I can see that. She's not bad looking, and she's nice. You could certainly do much worse. But your words kind of implied there was more than one person. Who else?"

"Um... none of these are anything major, you know. Just a little crush..."

"You're holding out on me, Addy."

"You too with this 'Addy' thing?"

"Don't change the subject."

Adira sighed. "Fine. I... I think your brother Bill is quite good looking."

"Ah, yes. He does get a lot of attention. Any others?"

"Nobody I know the name of."

"So you don't share Iliana's interest in Wood?"

"Nope."

"Does Iliana like Cho Chang as well?"

"I don't know if I can say."

 _ **#You can tell her, Addy.#**_

 _Not you too!_

 _ **It's your official nickname now, the rest of us have all agreed on it.**_

Carefully trying to hide her reaction to this, Adira nodded at Ginny.

"Okay, Iliana says I can tell you. Yes, she fancies Cho Chang as well."

"So you all can feel each other's feelings and still tell whose are whose?"

"For the most part, yes. Occasionally it can be difficult. Wait... you knew I was listening in whenever you and Iliana were talking?"

Ginny shrugged. "Yeah. I knew in the... I guess you could say 'intellectual' sense. But it was pretty much a case of 'out of sight, out of mind.' My odd behavior was pretty much a reaction to your face."

"And you've since gotten over that?"

"You've grown your hair out, changed it. And you put pretty things in your hair now, and paint your nails, and stuff. Once you started doing that, the feelings that made me so nervous around you began to fade. Which led to the soul-searching that got me to approach you today." She shrugged again, looking at the floor.

"Well, that's all water under the bridge now. Come on, I'm getting peckish, let's get a snack."

Ginny smiled and followed her new friend into the kitchen.

The animagus stuff was still not going well three weeks later. Meditation had gotten a little easier, but it was still difficult and wasn't yielding anything. She knew they shouldn't get too discouraged, since Sirius had said it took him, her father, and Peter several years to work out how to do it. But this time, she had the help of someone who had done it. She had books about it, too, that would have been very difficult to get at Hogwarts. What was more, they had a natural affinity for transformations.

Occasionally Lupin would come over and continue to teach her the Patronus Charm, even though the dementors were long since gone from Hogwarts. She still hadn't made a corporeal Patronus, though. She wondered if she ever would.

Her nerves as the date of meeting the wizengamot representative approached increased. But finally, it came. Adira barely paid attention to anything as they got ready to go, and so time seemed to fly by, leaving her finding herself next to Sirius outside the door she'd be meeting whoever it was. She began to panic at this loss of time, though a quick check of their memory showed they just hadn't been paying attention.

She panicked more when the door opened and a young woman stepped out to call her name.

"Adira Potter? The representative will see you now."

"Come on, I'll be right there with you," Sirius said, guiding her into the room.

There was a chair facing away from her behind a desk. As she came in, the chair turned, and none other than Albus Dumbledore was there.

"Dumbledore! Sir. I... I wasn't expecting you to be the one I'd have to talk with."

"Normally I am not. The task usually goes to the most junior member of the wizengamot, but I pulled some strings. Given the contents of the scan you went through here, the others agreed it was acceptable. I really am sorry I put you through so much worry, Adira. But now you can rest assured that my verdict is that you shall be granted the name and gender change you requested. I will start the process of getting all of that taken care of today. You will still need to stop by Gringott's, for they have their own ways of doing things, but this paper here will help you with them," he said, handing a stunned Adira an official-looking document detailing the changes made to the records, with Dumbledore's own signature on the bottom.

"Thank you, sir!"

"Not a problem, my dear. Not that I had any doubt you'd be able to get it with another, I just thought a friendly face would help your nerves."

"It did, thank you."

Dumbledore nodded.

"Dumbledore," Sirius said, "is it safe to talk about... the thing we discussed at the end of the school year?"

"Here? No, it isn't. But if you wish, I can come visit you at your home to speak of it."

"Is that okay, Adira?"

She nodded. "Sure."

"Good. When are you coming over, headmaster?"

"Oh, I have nothing pressing, if you wish me to come with you now."

Sirius turned to Adira.

"That sounds good."

"Then let us go now," Dumbledore said.

They left the room together, and made their way up to the lobby of the Ministry of Magic, and took the Floo back home. The wards shimmered briefly when they got in, before Sirius gave the password that let them into the building.

"Impressive warding," Dumbledore commented. "Wizard and goblin warding both, I see. Marvelous."

"This way, headmaster," Sirius said, escorting them to the sitting room. When they got there, an owl with ear-like tufts of feathers sat proudly on one of the chairs, a letter in its beak. Adira looked at the owl warily for a moment before she recognized the owl Sirius had given to Ron to replace Scabbers. She took the letter from its beak and gave it some owl treats.

"Hold on a moment, I want to read this letter first," Adira said to Sirius and Dumbledore.

 _Adira or whoever,_

 _Hi, it's Ron. I was just going to send Arnan here to tell you his new name, but then I remembered you've got that thing today at the Ministry. So how'd that go? Do you know yet? Tell me all about it. Ginny wants to know, too._

 _All for now._

 _Ron_

"Cool. Arnan, you can stay here for a few hours 'til I write a reply, okay?"

The owl just regarded her haughtily.

She laughed. "Oh my. I'd be very surprised if you and Hermes didn't get into a haughtiness contest, Arnan."

"Put Arnan in with Hedwig, will you, Adira? I know owls can't speak, but I don't feel comfortable talking around him about... what we're going to talk about."

"Sure thing, Sirius," she said, letting the owl sit on her arm before taking him into her bedroom with Hedwig.

"Hey Hedwig, this is Ron's new owl, Arnan. Keep each other company for a while, will you? I don't know how long this will take."

The two owls nodded amicably at one another and then settled down to sleep. Adira paused momentarily to wonder at the weirdness of wizards using nocturnal birds to send each other letters, before heading back down to the sitting room.

When she sat down next to Sirius, Dumbledore began.

"So what exactly did you wish to discuss, Sirius?"

"About these horcruxes, headmaster. How do we destroy them? How do we even _find_ them? How many does he have? And what will he have used to make them?"

"I have some theories about the three latter questions, but I need to gather more information before I can be sure. As to the first question, horcruxes are very difficult to destroy. The only things that I am sure will destroy the things are basilisk venom and fiendfyre. Fiendfyre is a spell that is difficult to cast and nearly impossible to control when cast. And basilisk venom, as you know, is rare, but we, er... have a supply on hand."

"We do?" Sirius asked in amazement. "What do you mean?"

"Er..." said Adira. "Well, in our second year... down in the Chamber of Secrets, we met a basilisk. We didn't know how to kill as basilisk, and we were faced with the possibility of being killed by one. So Al just... he just started talking to it. In parseltongue. Convinced it to switch sides. It turned on Riddle, biting the diary, killing it. We've got an arrangement with the basilisk, feeding it with food from the Hogwarts kitchens. In return, it stays down there and doesn't threaten anyone."

Sirius's eyes went wide. "You have a pet basilisk? In the school?"

"Yeah, that's right in essentials."

Running his hands through his hair in astonished silence, Sirius looked like he was feeling ill.

"A basilisk! A bloody great basilisk! In a school!"

"Yes, a basilisk. A basilisk which, incidentally, is much more easily controlled than the giant cerberus named Fluffy that was in the castle in our first year."

"A bloody basilisk _and_ a giant three-headed dog?"

"Not to mention the talking spiders the size of automobiles living in the Forbidden Forest, imported by Hagrid, that we met in our second year," Adira felt Zoey saying with her voice in a casual sort of way, as though deadly monsters were a hum-drum thing to have at a school. "They very nearly ate us."

"Now now, let's try not give your godfather a stress-induced heart attack, please. I have many skills, but healing magic is not one I am especially good at," Dumbledore said in a very droll way.

Adira looked over at Sirius, who was clutching his hair like it was a lifeline and breathing very heavily, and heard Zoey giggle. It took her a moment to realize that the giggle had been aloud.

"Anyway," Adira said, trying not to smile, "we were talking about horcruxes. I agree with Sirius, and I would like to add that we need more information about them. In fact, I mentioned this to Sirius once, weeks ago."

Calmer now with the distraction, Sirius nodded. "I know I could get books about them at Knockturn Alley if I looked hard enough, but well... between not wanting to be spotted there by Light wizards and being sure the Dark ones wouldn't trust me, I've decided not to."

"Yes, I should think so. Such books are not precisely illegal, but having one does make the Ministry scrutinize you very closely if they find out you own one. Unless, of course, the book belongs to a school."

"You're not telling me the library has books about horcruxes, are you?" Adira asked, incredulous.

"The library does not have books about horcruxes anymore, not even in the restricted section. It did, back when Tom Riddle was in school, but when I became headmaster, I removed them. The one I kept is now hidden in one of my rooms at the school. In case such information might be necessary one day, as it indeed was."

"Is there any chance we can, er... borrow the book? Or look at it in your office?"

"I shall consider it, Miss Potter," Dumbledore said carefully. "In the meantime, what you must know about horcruxes is what I have already told you; they are pieces of the wizard's soul, earth-bound in protective casings. Such casings are so thoroughly protected magically, with spells to protect them from destruction, and often riddled with hexes, that as I said, only fiendfyre and basilisk venom can destroy them." He paused a moment, thinking, then added, "I can also say that horcruxes are the opposite of a person. Where a person can die without damaging their soul, when a horcrux is destroyed, that part of the soul is destroyed forever."

"But what about Voldemort's horcruxes, specifically? How do we hunt those down?"

"I will be gathering more information about Voldemort. I assure both of you that when I have what I need, I will begin teaching Adira all that I know and suspect about Voldemort and his horcruxes. I am not at that point yet, though. Please do not badger me about it."

His tone was light, but it was nonetheless clear that he would brook no more discussion of it for now.

"Okay, so... if basilisk venom is so destructive, is there any way we can collect it for when we need it? In case Adira can't get down to the Chamber for some reason, I mean."

"As to that: yes, there are vials I can acquire that have charms that allow them to hold basilisk venom. They wouldn't work on horcruxes, though, these spells. And even if they did, they are temporary; long-term storage of basilisk venom is fraught with difficulty, the venom must be re-flasked every so often before it burns through the flask. I believe each vial lasts around 6 months before it begins to develop leaks."

Dumbledore sighed. "Alas, if only we knew where the Sword of Griffindor was. It has properties that would be helpful to us. It is goblin-made to have the power to imbibe only that which strengthens it. Meaning that we could pour basilisk venom on it, and it would imbibe the venom, giving us another weapon against horcruxes."

"That would indeed be useful, sir."

"Yes, it would. Ah well, no sense worrying over things that we can do nothing about. We have a ready source of basilisk venom at hand, and that is enough. What we really need now, as I have intimated, is information. Information I have already begun to seek. With luck, we can find all the horcruxes and destroy them before Voldemort has the chance to regain a body."

There were a few noises of agreement, but nobody really spoke. There was silence for a few beats until Dumbledore broke it.

"Are there any other questions I have not already answered?"

Adira and Sirius looked at one another, unable to think of anything to add.

Dumbledore stood up then.

"Well, if that is all, I shall leave the two of you in peace. Good day to you, Sirius, and Adira."

Twinkling his eyes at them first, he then went to the hearth and took the Floo back to wherever it was he went during the summer. With him gone, the two of them went back to sit down again.

"Well, Adira, how's your animagus studies going?"

"Not so well. Meditation is difficult. Even when I manage it, nothing comes of it. And honestly, I don't think the normal way of doing things is going to work with us. We already change so often and so quickly that the mandrake leaf isn't necessary, I think. The only real problem, in our opinion, is that when we try to transform into an animal, it's always some weird hybrid creature, and human-sized. No idea what that's about."

"I thought Tier was the one that did that sort of thing?"

"He is. For whatever reason, when we need to transform into something other than our usual form, we have to tap into his abilities. But no matter what animal we picture in our mind, it doesn't come out right. There's some block there, that once we figure out will, I think, let us become our animal or animals."

"Well, the transformation isn't supposed to work for any random animal shape. Animagi only have one animal form for the same sort of reason the Patronus only has one form. It's a reflection of your soul and your mind."

"Ah, that could explain it. There's like, five of us, with a common memory, and overlapping thoughts at times. I'm betting the reflection is complicated by that."

"Sounds like you need to disentangle from one another, or all concentrate on one animal."

"We've already tried that. It isn't working. Watch, we'll try to concentrate on the form of a black cat."

She stood up and closed her eyes, concentrating. After a few moments, she began to glow and shrink. It seemed to be going well until she got to Zoey's height, and then the form went wobbly and unstable. After fighting it for almost an entire minute, their form settled on a Zoey-sized catgirl with one hand a paw and the other just furry, half a tail, and one leg shorter than the other. The face was also very distorted, halfway between the shape of a cat's head and a human's head.

The catgirl monstrosity opened its mouth to speak, and a creepy sound that was nothing like either a human voice nor a cat's voice came forth, startling them both.

A brief glow later, and Adira was back to normal.

"See what I mean? That was the closest we've gotten to a cat form yet."

"I do see what you mean. But don't worry too much. The animagus transformation is very difficult. One of the reasons it's usually overseen by the Ministry is the bizarre and freakish ways the transformation can go wrong. You're just experiencing something similar, I expect. The only difference is, you can put yourselves right again with a thought, and most wizards would need a trip to St. Mungo's. Keep on practicing. You seem to be making a lot of progress, even without the mandrake leaf."

"Do you think I should use the mandrake leaf?"

"Hmm... I don't know. We'll leave that decision for later, since you seem to be doing okay without it for now."

"You call that okay?"

"Well, look at what you lot have become in the past. From what you've told me, one of your previous bestial transformations was something like a cross between a human, a wolf, and a dragon. At least now you're recognizable as being a cross between only _two_ species. Like I say, it's progress."

Adira laughed. "Oh, I guess you're right, Sirius. It's just frustrating. Been working on this, and the Patronus charm, and neither of them are getting very far. I still can only make a bit of mist, with the Patronus charm."

"Well remember, Adira, your name is officially changed now. As is your gender. Maybe concentrating on that will give you a good strong happy memory."

"Oh yeah, that's right!"

Adira got out her wand, and concentrated on her new happy memory, on the joy of being recognized for who and what she was at last.

"Expecto patronum!"

The wand flared with bright white light, and there was a vague shape, but it turned into formless vapor almost at once.

"WOW! Did you see that?"

"I did, Adira. That was very nearly corporeal. Good progress, keep it up."

"Did you see what it was?"

"Nope. Could've been anything. All I saw with any clarity was an eye, which didn't give me any clues, it was still so blurry."

"Oh, well, at least it's getting better."

She concentrated again.

"Expecto patronum!"

This time, the form was a little more solid, for slightly longer.

"Looked like some kind of canine, I think," Sirus said. "Maybe a wolf, or a dog? Not sure."

She tried a few more times, but each time it was even less distinct than the first time.

"Ah well, don't worry. You're still making progress. Keep practicing, you'll get it. And what you've got now is still enough to buy some time to get away. And you're only 14, so even an indistinct patronus is a huge achievement."

She sighed. She really didn't like how frustrating it was trying to do these things. She wanted to skip the waiting, but there wasn't any way to do that, so she just resigned herself to more practice.

Note: I would like to credit the fanfics I got a lot of the ideas for the animagus process from, but I've read so many at this point that I don't remember which ones I got these ideas from.

Note two: Lame ending to the chapter, I know, but... *shrugs*


	22. The Quidditch Cup

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 22"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-two:** **The Quidditch Cup**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__ _and_ _ _{Tier}__ _if I ever get around to it_ _ _.__

 _Note 4: This is a long chapter. But I made it less long by cutting out the World Cup match itself, just doing some important bits before and after._

 _ _***__ _FAYANORA_ _ _***__

On July 31st, Sirius and Adira went by Floo to the Burrow for Adira's birthday party. The first thing she saw when she got there was Ron and Ginny. The second thing she saw was a brief vision of bushy brown hair before another girl was hugging her excitedly.

"Hello Hermione. Your parents let you come to my party, too?"

"Yes. They're almost as fascinated by magic as Mr. Weasley is fascinated with Muggles. They're just politer about it."

"How'd you get here?"

"Oh, Mr. Weasley picked me up with his car."

"Cool. If I'd thought about it, I could have had Sirius pick you up on his motorbike."

Hermione blanched at that. "Um... I don't think they would approve of that."

"It's perfectly safe," Sirius said. "I've got charms on it that keep it from getting hit by cars and stuff, charms that keep the bike upright, and a charm to keep you from falling off. You could probably balance on one foot the whole way and be fine. Not that I'd recommend trying it, of course."

"I still don't think they'd approve. And, well... I don't think I'd be very interested. Sounds scary. Like flying, but closer to the ground."

"Ah well, if you're afraid of it, then I'll remember to never offer. I quite understand, it's a heady experience even for me."

"Hello there, dearie," said Mrs. Weasley, bustling into the room. "We're setting up outside, since there's more room out there."

"Cool. I hope there are charms to keep the bugs away, though."

"Oh yes, I'm quite handy at insect-repelling charms, don't worry about that."

Adira and the others headed outside and around the side, where Mr. Weasley was setting up tables and chairs with his wand. Despite this, Adira grabbed a chair and began helping.

"Oh I've got it, Adira. You're the birthday girl, there's no need to help."

"I like helping, when it's people I like," she said. "Just like I like cooking for people I like."

"Speaking of cooking," one of the twins said with a grin, "has Mum taught Sirius anything about cooking yet?"

"I've been getting lessons," Sirius admitted. "But sadly the progress is slow. The other day I managed make toast without burning it."

"Yeah, I heard, which is why I brought it up. Mum is starting to worry. Ten lessons in, and that's all he can manage. Well, that and boiling eggs. I overheard Mum the other day muttering to herself about having to send meals to him and Adira via Floo."

"Oh there's no need for that," Adira said. "I can cook. I used to do it for the Dursleys all the time. I hated doing it for them, but I like doing it for myself or for family and friends."

"Well, Adira, I think that's the last of the chairs. Oh, and here comes Molly, just in time."

Mrs. Weasley was floating a line of pots and pans and dishes of food over to the tables with her wand. She set them down and went back for more. Adira followed and helped carry things out to the table. Before long, they had a meal ready for 10 people – all the Weasleys except Bill and Charlie, plus Adira and Hermione.

The cooking was, as ever, magnificent.

"Mrs. Weasley," Adira said between bites, "your cooking really is amazing. In fact, if you wanted or needed to, I'm sure you could get a job as a cook at a restaurant or pub. I'm sure people would pay loads for cooking this good."

"Why thank you, dear. That's kind of you to say," the Weasley matriarch said, grinning.

Adira went back to her meal, pleased.

A few minutes later, she noticed Mr. Weasley kept staring at her with a thoughtful expression on his face.

"What is it, Mr. Weasley? Do I have something on my face?"

"No, nothing like that. It's nothing."

"Oh come on, then."

"Well... okay. If you insist. It's just... I'm curious, Adira; are you the only one of you lot who age?" Mr. Weasley asked.

Adira put her fork down. "Um, no. Iliana is aging along with me."

"Right, yes, sorry. I should have remembered seeing her age, too. But er... is Alastair getting any older?"

"Ah, Al. As to him, no idea. He was pretty much 14 when we were 11. If he is aging, he's not showing it. Doesn't look a day older than he did back then. I really hope he's not going to be stuck at 14 forever. I'm pretty much resigned to Zoey being six forever, but I don't think I could stand one of us being a teenager for the rest of our life."

"Yeah, Al's always been older," said one of the twins. "It'd be weird to see him younger than you two."

After dinner and cake, it was time to open presents. From Sirius she got a wrist holster for her wand.

"The bloke at the shop said it's charmed. You put your wand in it, then when you want your wand in your hand, out it pops right into your hand. You don't have to worry about dropping it, either, when it pops out, because it makes the wand stick to your hand even if it's open palm, until you actually grasp hold of it, then the charm lifts until next time."

"Cool! Thanks, Sirius!"

"You're welcome. I liked it so much, I got one for myself as well," he said, demonstrating it for her. Sure enough, his wand popped right into his hand.

"Goes back with a thought, too," he said, letting it get sucked back into the holster.

"Merlin's beard!" Adira practically shouted in her excitement, immediately strapping the holster to her arm, and putting her wand in it to practice making it come out and go back in.

Sirius's gift was the most impressive, but she loved every gift she got. Ginny got her a bottle of color-changing nail polish. From Ron she received a three-galleon gift certificate to Honeyduke's. Ron's parents gave her homemade fudge. Hermione gave her a charm bracelet with an actual charm on it.

"It's a shield charm on the bracelet," she explained. "I don't know how strong it is, or how long it'll last, but it should ward off at least one or two mild to moderate hexes."

She also got cards, which she loved. She still had all her birthday cards from previous years in her trunk. Which, after three years at Hogwarts, was beginning to get very full, even after she'd gotten rid of the Lockhart books. She made a mental note to get a new trunk at Diagon Alley.

The twins even gave her a gift, but not until after everything was put away. They'd come up to Ron's room to talk privately with her.

"We got you something, too. Didn't want to give it to you in front of Mum."

"A bit of something we've been developing. Ton-Tongue Toffees. Don't eat any unless you want your tongue to grow to the size of a baby seal," Fred warned.

"You're free to use up to three of them on deserving victims," George said, after handing her a whole box full of them. "But the rest we're just giving you for safe-keeping. Mum's been destroying all our hard work. But she wouldn't dare destroy something of yours."

"Trick candies, huh?"

"Yeah. We want to start a joke shop. Been our heart's desire for years. But Mum wants us to get respectable jobs. Normal jobs. _Boring_ jobs."

Adira laughed. "Yeah, I can't imagine you two doing anything normal. Hold on."

With no more warning than that, she shrunk down, without glowing, into Zoey.

"Let me just hold that for you," she said, grabbing the box. Then she pulled it into herself as they transformed again into Adira.

"Wow, she can do real objects now?"

"Um, yeah. Yeah, I feel them in there, still. Wherever it is stuff goes when she does that. She just can't do anything alive, we've found."

"Ah, so she couldn't hide, say, one of us in there?"

"Nope. I'm not sure it would be a good idea even if she could. It might be deadly to anything alive, that isn't one of us."

"Well now that you've got them in there, we might call upon Zoey to return a few of them at some point in the future, on short notice."

"Fine by me. I wish you two luck. You'll be brilliant at a joke shop."

"Thank you for your good wishes, dearest Addy-Rah. But we still have a few more years left at school before we go off out into the world to find our fortune."

That night, in bed, she reflected that each birthday kept getting better and better. She was very glad to be away from the Dursleys, even if it meant that the spell Dumbledore had cast to extend the protection of her mother's sacrifice had broken.

In August, Ron wrote to them to tell them his father had tickets to the Quidditch World Cup via a friend at work, and asked if Adira and Sirius wanted to come as well.

"Can we, Sirius? Can we? Please?"

Sirius hemmed and hawed. "Well, you can, sure. But me, I dunno. I... well that is to say... well..."

"You're worried about weird looks? Scared looks?"

"Yes. But I don't think I can exactly go in disguise, either."

"You look a lot better than your old wanted posters, these days. Barely recognizable."

Sirius raised an eyebrow at her.

"Thanks, Adira, but I know that's not true. Plenty of people recognize me."

"Oh come on, there'll be people from all over the world there, and I doubt your face is known much outside of Britain."

"I wouldn't be so sure, kiddo."

Adira cocked her head ever so slightly, a sure sign she was listening to someone on the inside.

"Al says you should go and wear a t-shirt that says 'Hello, my name is Sirius Black, ask me how.'"

Sirius just looked at her like a dog might look at something confusing to it.

"Never mind, it's a Muggle cultural reference. Anyway, Sirius, don't worry. It'll be a huge place from what I hear, so you'll blend into the crowd. It shouldn't be any more difficult than going to Diagon Alley."

He sighed. "I hope you're right. But yeah, I'll go with you. I can put up with some minor frustrations to make sure you're safe."

She hugged him round the middle in celebration, and he hugged her back.

The Quidditch World Cup wouldn't be until August 24th. Until then, with most of her homework done, Sirius insisted she not remain in the house all the time. He took her out different places at least once a week, going places like parks, museums, the beach. He signed her up for swimming lessons at a wizarding pool in case she had any transformations, which were twice a week. He even occasionally took her out for rides on his motorbike just for the heck of it. It was quickly shaping up to being her best summer ever.

A few weeks before the Cup, Adira and company began having nightly dreams of a slightly odd nature. The dream was always the same; Adira would be sitting in class, between Al and Iliana, and they'd be paying attention to an unfamiliar teacher who was black with her hair in elaborate braids that were tied back together in a protruding bun like a small beehive 'do made of braids. They could read the words on the board perfectly, but could never quite remember what they said when they woke up.

After what felt like a few minutes of this, a boy behind them would say something to get their attention. They would turn to look at him, and he was always the same boy. He looked to be from India, or at least had ancestors from there, but he spoke with an American accent. His skin was dark brown, making him almost as black as the teacher.

"You said something?" Al prompted.

The boy regarded them with eyes that were so brown they were almost black, but unlike Snape's black eyes, this boy's eyes were warm, calm, and thoughtful. He regarded them calmly, thinking.

"Oh," the boy said lazily, his eyes on his notes. "Just saying you should take notes. There's going to be a quiz later."

"Quiz? What are you on about?" Al demanded.

"Oh you know," said the boy as he wrote down some notes from the blackboard, "the quiz. Several quizzes, actually. Little ones at first. Then the big one."

"The O.W.L.'s? Those aren't til fifth year."

The boy sighed. "No, that's not it," the boy said, now doodling on a piece of parchment.

Al looked around. "This is a dream. We're asleep."

"Yes, you are," the Indian boy agreed, not looking up from his drawing.

"Why aren't you taking notes, if it's so important?" Al demanded of the boy.

"I've been getting private lessons. Mother insisted. That's why I've been away for so long."

"Away? From school?"

"No. Just away."

Al's eyes narrowed.

"What House are you in?"

The boy said nothing, just shrugged. He hadn't looked at them once since getting their attention.

"What's your name?" Adira asked.

The boy stopped drawing, and looked up at her, smirking. He said nothing, just put an index finger to his mouth and winked before going back to his drawing.

"Cryptic bastard. But I guess that's dreams for ya," Al said.

The boy shushed them again, this time unsmilingly, and pointed up at the teacher. They turned to look. The board now had what looked like strategic drawings for Quidditch on it, lots of X's and O's and arrows.

"Mother will be very cross if you fail the big test. But not half as cross as you will be."

They had turned to face the boy again. But he vanished, so they turned back to the front.

"CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" screamed a voice as someone jumped out at them.

Adira screamed, and fell out of bed in a tangle of sheets. Sirius came bursting into the room as she did, calling her name. After a lot of struggle and confusion, Sirius got her out of the sheets and began calming her down.

"I had it again! Same weird dream seven nights in a row! The exact same!"

"Including the jump scare at the end?"

"Yes! What does it mean?"

"I wish I knew, Adira, I really do."

She made no sign she'd heard him, as she was still recovering from the scary end of the dream. It took many minutes, but finally her breathing was slowing down, she was getting calmer.

"Have you told Dumbledore yet?"

"Yes. But he doesn't think it's a vision, if that's what you mean."

"Yeah, I don't think so either. I think it's just a general warning. Which I think is coming from our subconscious mind. I think its main message is that 'constant vigilance' at the end of the dream."

"What else do you remember?"

She concentrated. "Something about taking notes. That there was going to be a quiz, or quizzes, and a big test. But not the O.W.L.s. A different kind of test, I think. And the boy in the dream said he'd been getting private lessons. He said that mother insisted."

"Hmm... well, dreams can be weird."

"Yeah, but this was weird in a very... a very clear way. Most dreams are utter nonsense. This one felt like it had a lot more sense to it than dreams usually do." She paused. "Anyway, I'll think more about it later. I'm still tired."

"Do you want me to sleep in the doggy bed?"

She chuckled. "No, I think I'll be fine."

"Okay, then. Sweet dreams."

Sirius tucked her in and kissed her on the forehead before leaving. She sighed, and tried to get back to sleep. It took a very long time.

That seventh night was the last of the dreams they had of the boy and the teacher. Their sleep was normal, then, until the Saturday before the Quidditch match.

The new dream followed an old man whose name they couldn't remember on waking. He was a caretaker at an old mansion, and thinking some kids had lit a room on fire, he'd instead discovered two wizards having a discussion.

With a fire in the grate, Voldemort sat facing the fire. He was sitting in a chair so tall that his head was not visible, and was talking with the other man, whose face was in shadow and whose voice was unfamiliar.

"Does my lord wish any more of the potion?" said the unfamiliar male voice, full of worshipful adulation. "Some small amount remains, my lord."

"Later," said a second voice. This too belonged to a man — but it was strangely high-pitched, and cold as a sudden blast of icy wind. "Move me closer to the fire."

"Of course, my lord," the worshipful voice said, the man hurrying to obey. He was wearing a hooded cloak, his face hidden in its shadows as he scooted the chair closer to the hearth.

"Where is Nagini?" asked the cold voice.

"I believe, my lord, that she went out to explore the house. Not being blessed as you are with the Speech, I cannot be sure."

"Good. You will milk her again before we retire," the cold voice commanded. "I will need feeding in the night; the journey has been very tiring, even with your help."

"Of course, my lord." A pause, then the servant's voice continued. "Does this mean we will be staying here? And if so, for how long?"

"A week. Perhaps longer. This place is moderately comfortable, and the plan cannot proceed yet. It would be foolish to act before the Quidditch World Cup is over."

"Ah yes," the servant said. "Understandable, with all the Ministry of Magic fools everywhere, keeping things from the bloody stupid Muggles. You are wise and cunning as always, my lord. I wish I could have half as much wisdom and cunning as you have."

The cold voice chuckled. "Yes, you are exactly as I remember. Alas, if only you had been able to get to me sooner."

"Speaking of sooner, my lord, but why, pray tell, are we trying to get hands on Harry Potter? He is so well protected, after all. I simply seek to understand the magnificence of your plan, if my weak mind is able to grasp it, my lord. Unless my understanding is not needed, of course, in which case I beg your forgiveness for my impertinence."

"Of course, of course. You are correct, your understanding is _not_ required. But I suppose, given the nature of your future duties, I shall tell you anyway. I _could_ use any witch or wizard who opposed me, but this one is particularly meaningful. The Potter creature has incredible powers of transformation, powers I hope to gain by using its blood to rebuild my body. And I shall wish to murder it myself to prove that it is a fluke. Ah, but I forget myself... you shall need to refer to it as _her_. At least part of the time."

"Yes, my lord. I have been doing my research. My contacts in the ministry have provided me with much information on the Potter... thing. I know the names and personas it has well. You shall have her, to do with her as you please."

"Excellent. This pleases me greatly."

"Thank you, my lord, thank you."

"Yes yes, that is enough fawning for now."

"Of course, my lord." Another pause, then, "However, I remain confused on one other point, my lord."

"And what is it that confuses you?"

"If I am to leave here as part of my duty to you, who is to care for you?"

"Why, that nosy woman of course."

"Er... Bertha Jorkins, you mean? My lord?"

"Yes, I mean Bertha Jorkins. She knows too much, even if her memory has been modified. I could break through those enchantments if I had need to. Instead, she will be my servant for a time. Then when she is no longer useful, I shall dispose of her."

"You are still so weak though, begging your pardon my lord. I simply fear for your safety if the Imperious curse should weaken or fail."

"Do you think that likely?"

"If I did not, I would not have brought it up, my lord."

The cold voice made a sound of pondering.

"You have a good point. But do not worry about it overmuch. I will keep her sleeping when not using her."

There was an uncertain silence from the servant.

"What's this? You still worry? Oh how touching. I have Nagini, though; if all else fails, Nagini will kill her, and I will send you an owl. We will figure something out. You could send someone else in her place. I think you know who I mean. Unless... you haven't disposed of him yet, have you?"

"As tempting as it is, he is still useful to us. So no, he goes about his duties still. In a manner of speaking, as he no longer works for the ministry."

"Good. So are you feeling better now?"

"Yes, my lord, I am."

"Anyway, if something were to happen to me, it would merely be inconvenient. We have a whole school year until that joyous day, if anything should happen."

"Of course, my lord. I am greatly relieved."

"Good. Anyway, Jorkins will be temporary. You will need to stay at the school, meaning that there is another... _ingredient..._ needed that you, in your duties, will not be able to provide me without causing that old goat to become very suspicious. We shall have to make alternate arrangements. That should not be too difficult, however; it worked once, so it should work again."

The servant nodded. "I understand. I will begin making preparations immediately."

"Good. Make sure it happens as soon as possible. She will need time to recover before the ritual."

"Yes, my lord."

"Hush! I think I hear Nagini."

The cold-voiced man's voice changed; he was hissing and spitting without drawing breath, and in response to this, a monstrous snake big enough to crush a man to death slithered into the room and settled on the hearth rug. There was a similar sound from the snake itself, before the man switched back to English.

"Nagini has interesting news," he said.

"What is it, my lord?"

"According to Nagini, there is an old Muggle man standing right outside this room, eavesdropping on our every word."

Frank didn't have a chance to hide himself. There were footsteps, and then the door of the room was flung wide open.

The man's hooded face was still in shadow; all that Frank could tell about the man was that he was a white man, and was skinny, his robes a bit too big for him. And his voice was very hoarse, as though he hadn't used it much before today.

"Invite him in, why don't you?" the cold voice said.

Jerking his head in something like a nod, the man grabbed Frank's arm with an iron grip and dragged him into the room, right behind the tall chair.

The fire was the only source of light in the room; it cast long, spidery shadows upon the walls. Frank stared at the back of the armchair; the man inside it seemed to be even smaller than his servant, for Frank couldn't even see the back of his head.

"You heard everything, Muggle?" said the cold voice.

"What's that you're calling me?" said Frank defiantly.

"I am calling you a Muggle," said the voice coolly. "It means that you are not a wizard."

"I don't know what you mean by wizard," said Frank, his voice growing steadier. "All I know is I've heard enough to interest the police tonight, I have. You've done murder and you're planning more! And I'll tell you this too," he added, on a sudden inspiration, "my wife knows I'm up here, and if I don't come back —"

"You have no wife," said the cold voice, very quietly. "Nobody knows you are here. You told nobody that you were coming. Do not lie to Lord Voldemort, Muggle, for he knows … he always knows."

"Is that right?" said Frank roughly. "Lord, is it? Well, I don't think much of your manners, _My Lord._ Turn 'round and face me like a man, why don't you?"

"But I am not a man, Muggle," said the cold voice, barely audible now over the crackling of the flames. "I am much, much more than a man. However … why not? I will face you. Turn my chair around, my most faithful," he commanded.

The hooded servant chuckled darkly. "With pleasure, my lord."

With two arms, he lifted up the chair and turned it around to face Frank. The snake hissed in warning as one leg got too close to its triangular head.

And then the chair was facing Frank, and he saw what was sitting in it. His walking stick fell to the floor with a clatter. He opened his mouth and let out a scream. He was screaming so loudly that he never heard the words the thing in the chair spoke as it raised a wand. There was a flash of green light, a rushing sound, and Frank Bryce crumpled. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Many, many miles away, Adira Potter woke with a scream.

"Adira! Are you alright?" Sirius asked after barging into her room.

Adira nodded, but remained in bed, sitting up, holding her legs with one arm, rubbing her scar with her free hand.

"Was it the dream from before?"

"No. This one was different. And my scar hurts. The only other time that happened, _he_ was nearby."

Sirius goggled at her, then looked around.

"Well, none of the wards have gone off. Should I check the hearth?"

"No, I don't think he's here. The dream... it was a long ways away. Another city somewhere."

"Tell me about it."

She began to recall as much of the dream and the overheard conversation as she could, but it was already fading.

"So," Sirius said at last, "sounds like Voldemort alright. And he killed a man? With the killing curse? But last I heard, he didn't have a body. You need a body to hold a wand, and use it. And he was plotting something to do with you?"

"Of course he was. He's obsessed with me."

"And you have no idea who the other man with him was?"

"None at all. I didn't recognize his voice, and I couldn't even see his face, it was in shadow."

"Hmm... could be a vision. Al's had one before."

"Could be. But I don't think it was a vision of the future. I think... it felt like a vision of the present."

"So you were there in real time?"

"I believe so, yes."

"Hmm... this is worrying. I'll have to tell Dumbledore, is that alright with you?"

"Yeah, I guess you'd better. If Voldemort is getting stronger... I don't know how he could, but..." her eyes got bigger with sudden realization. "The prophecy! Trelawney's prophecy! She predicted this! We thought it was about Wormtail, but he's dead. Someone else must have found Voldemort, and helped him, like Quirrell did!"

"The prophecy? Doesn't that mean whoever it is was once a servant of his? The prophecy said 'the servant has been chained these twelve years.' I don't know how that could be, though; I haven't heard of any breakouts from Azkaban. My own was the only one there's ever been, as far as I know of. So they must've been chained in some other way. Someone who avoided Azkaban? But who wasn't free to pursue Voldemort? That doesn't make any sense. Who would chain a death eater for 12 years unless it was the Ministry?"

"Bloody mysteries," Adira said, her head in her hands. "I just want a normal year at Hogwarts, is that so much to ask for? Well, as normal as I can get, being the weirdo I am."

They went to the Burrow again the night before the Quidditch Cup, once more using the Floo. And this time, there were even more people than had been at Adira's birthday party, because along with Hermione, Bill and Charlie were there as well.

Within minutes of getting there, Percy stuck his head out his door as they were going up to Ron's room.

"Why hello there, Adira," Percy said, holding his hand out.

She took it with a grin. "Hi Percy. What's up?"

Percy puffed himself up proudly. "I've got a job. Personal secretary for Mr. Alfonse Alder, who took over from Mr. Crouch as the new Head of International Magical Co-operation after Crouch got fired."

"Wow. What sort of stuff do they do?"

"Well, most recently, we've arranged the Quidditch World Cup. I'm also working on a report for Mr. Alder about standardizing cauldron thickness. Some of these foreign imports are far too shallow, causing melting cauldrons."

"You know, before I found out we were expected to use pewter cauldrons, I would have guessed cauldrons to be made of iron or steel. Pewter seems a strange choice for a cauldron, being made of lead and other metals. Especially for a school, given that lead poisoning is very bad for children."

"Ah, that brings me to another point; inferior pewter standards. Not all pewter is made the same, Adira. Some pewter has hardly any lead in it at all, and anyway, if you make the cauldrons properly, the lead doesn't leach out into the potion at all. Which is why we need to standardize cauldron quality in general; too many of these foreign imports have shallow bottoms and are made of inferior pewters that melt far too easily."

"Hmm... that could explain why Neville Longbottom's cauldron always melts; maybe he keeps getting inferior cauldrons."

"Could be, Adira, could be."

Seeming satisfied that he'd bragged sufficiently to an interested party, Percy went back into his room with a nod of the head and a grin. Adira grinned the rest of the way back to Ron's room.

Later, as she passed through the kitchen, she saw Mrs. Weasley cooking in a very grumpy way. Still wary of angry people after all these years away from the Dursleys, she made her stealthy way outside and found Ron.

"What's up with your mum?"

"What? Oh yeah, she got one of Fred and George's fake wands again. It turned into a chicken. She didn't find it very funny. And she's still sore at them anyway. She found a bunch of order forms for this joke shop they're trying to start, Weasley's Wizard Wheezes."

"Ah, that. They did say she was after their stuff."

"You knew already?"

"Yeah, from my birthday. Zoey is, er... holding some merchandise for them. Some of those ton-tongue toffees."

"Really? They told you but not me?" He looked hurt by this.

"If you had a secret business that your mother didn't approve of, would _you_ tell _them_ about it?"

"Oh. Guess I wouldn't; I'd tell you. Well alright, then," he said brightly.

Bill walked by then, making Adira blush. Ron seemed oblivious, still talking about something that they weren't listening to.

By seven o'clock, the two tables were groaning under dishes and dishes of Mrs. Weasley's excellent cooking, and the nine Weasleys, Adira, and Hermione were settling themselves down to eat beneath a clear, deep-blue sky. Adira listened rather than talked as she helped herself to chicken and ham pie, boiled potatoes, and salad.

At the far end of the table, Percy was telling his father all about his report on cauldron bottoms.

"I've told Mr. Alder that I'll have it ready by Tuesday," Percy was saying pompously. "That's a bit sooner than he expected it, but I like to keep on top of things. I think he'll be grateful I've done it in good time, I mean, it's extremely busy in our department just now, what with all the arrangements for the World Cup. We're just not getting the support we need from the Department of Magical Games and Sports. Ludo Bagman —"

"I like Ludo," said Mr. Weasley mildly. "He was the one who got us such good tickets for the Cup. I did him a bit of a favor: His brother, Otto, got into a spot of trouble — a lawnmower with unnatural powers — I smoothed the whole thing over."

"Oh Bagman's likeable enough, but when I compare him to Mr. Alder... Mr. Alder isn't as good as I've heard Mr. Crouch was, pity he got fired, but at least Mr. Alder wouldn't lose a member of his department. Did you know Bertha Jorkins has been missing for over a month now? Went on holiday to Albania and never came back?"

"Yes, I was asking Ludo about that," said Mr. Weasley, frowning. "He says Bertha's gotten lost plenty of times before now — though I must say, if it was someone in my department, I'd be worried. …"

"Oh Bertha's _hopeless,_ all right," said Percy. "I hear she's been shunted from department to department for years, much more trouble than she's worth … but all the same, Bagman ought to be trying to find her. I hear Crouch keeps coming back to the Ministry even though he's been fired; seems to have taken a personal interest in finding Bertha. She used to work in our department at one time, I think he grew fond of her. But Bagman just keeps laughing and saying she probably misread the map and ended up in Australia instead of Albania. However" — Percy heaved an impressive sigh and took a deep swig of elderflower wine — "we've got quite enough on our plates at the Department of International Magical Cooperation without trying to find members of other departments too. As you know, we've got another big event to organize right after the World Cup."

Percy cleared his throat significantly and looked down toward the end of the table where Adira, Ron, and Hermione were sitting. " _You_ know the one I'm talking about, Father." He raised his voice slightly. "The top-secret one."

Ron rolled his eyes and muttered at Adira and Hermione. "He's been trying to trying to get us to ask him about that all summer long. Probably an exhibition of thick-bottomed cauldrons."

"So," Adira said to Percy, "what's this top-secret thing you keep hinting at?"

"Well, Adira," Percy said matter-of-factly, "that's top-secret, of course."

"Don't worry, Addy," Sirius said between bites, "I'll look into it for you."

"Thanks, Sirius!"

There were a lot of conversations going on, and Adira sampled them a bit at a time. There was talk of the Quidditch Cup, in which she heard about Bulgaria's seeker Viktor Krum, and Ireland having the best team of the two. Adira felt Iliana perk up at the Quidditch talk. They both liked watching Quidditch, but of the two of them, Iliana was more into it because she was a player as well as a spectator.

"Look at the time," Mrs. Weasley said suddenly, checking her wristwatch. "You really should be in bed, the whole lot of you — you'll be up at the crack of dawn to get to the Cup. Adira, if you leave your school list out, I'll get your things for you tomorrow in Diagon Alley. I'm getting everyone else's. There might not be time after the World Cup, the match went on for five days last time."

"Cool!" Iliana said with Adira's voice. "Hope it does this time!"

"Well, I certainly don't," said Percy sanctimoniously. "We're quite busy enough without a five day long backlog. My intray would be be so full my desk would break in half!"

"Could you borrow a time turner in case that happens?"

"I doubt it, Adira. People from the ministry would notice if I was in two places at once, since some of them are working security at the match. Oh, if only I could, though."

"Anyway, Mrs. Weasley, Sirius and I need to go to Diagon Alley to get me a new trunk. My old one is getting way too small for my needs."

"Ah okay. You and he can go with me, then."

When they woke up in the morning, it felt like they'd barely slept at all when they got shaken awake by Mrs. Weasley. And when her hair fell over her eyes, she noticed Adira was gone; they'd gone to bed as Adira and woken up as Iliana again. Not that it mattered much who was 'driving'; Adira would still get to see the game, as would all the others.

"Time to go, Iliana dear," Mrs. Weasley whispered, moving on to wake Ron.

Groggily, Iliana looked to the window. It was still dark out. Then she spotted the twins sitting at the foot of her bed.

"The sun's not even awake yet, why are we?" she complained. But she got up anyway, having gotten used to being woken up early for Quidditch practices.

"What she said," Fred muttered groggily, stifling a yawn.

Not wanting to change in front of the boys, Iliana got a dress and panties out of the suitcase she'd brought along for the night, and went to go find somewhere private to change.

"In here, Iliana," Ginny said as Iliana approached her room. "Hermione's already in here with me. Why are you lot still sleeping in Ron's room anyway?"

She shrugged. "Habit? Anyway, I trust Ron."

"Well get in here, silly. Oh, sorry Hermione. It's just Iliana."

Ginny had opened the door wide at just the wrong time, and Iliana briefly saw the other girl in her panties. Not that she cared, though; Iliana may be bi, but she got no thrill out of seeing someone she thought of as a sister in that state. Now, if it had been Cho, maybe things would be different. But then again, maybe not.

"Ooh, that's a pretty dress," Ginny said when Iliana started changing into it.

"Thanks. Sirius took Addy shopping the other day, we got a bunch of stuff. Speaking of, we're gonna have to get a bigger trunk; we're running out of room in our current one."

"Addy? I thought Adira didn't like being called anything but Adira?"

"Yeah, Sirius started calling her Addy, and the rest of us adopted the nickname. Addy hates it, but tolerates it. Hey, that rhymed!"

"So does that mean I can start calling you Illy?"

"Only if you want to be transfigured into a snail," Iliana said with an evil grin. "Remember, you can call me Lee if you must shorten my name."

"Yeah, but that doesn't really make much sense."

"Neither does 'Bill' for 'William,' but people use it anyway."

"True. But you don't really like Lee either."

"How are you two so talkative?" Hermione asked. "I'm barely awake."

Iliana shrugged. "Dunno. If we were Addy, we'd be like you now, but I have this ability to wake up more fully in a faster time than she does. Not sure why."

They continued dressing in silence. Then the four of them headed downstairs into the kitchen, accompanied by Hermione's yawns.

Mrs. Weasley was stirring the contents of a large pot on the stove, while Mr. Weasley was sitting at the table, checking a sheaf of large parchment tickets. He looked up as the girls entered and spread his arms so that they could see his clothes more clearly. He was wearing what appeared to be a golfing sweater and a very old pair of jeans, slightly too big for him and held up with a thick leather belt.

"What d'you think?" he asked anxiously. "We're supposed to go incognito — do I look like a Muggle, Ad... er... Iliana?"

"That's actually not bad," she said, smiling. "I've truly seen Muggles wear worse things than that. Congratulations. It might not be the height of fashion, but it's good."

"Where're Bill and Charlie and Per-Per-Percy?" said George, failing to stifle a huge yawn.

"Well, they're Apparating, aren't they?" said Mrs. Weasley, heaving the large pot over to the table and starting to ladle porridge into bowls. "So they can have a bit of a lie-in."

"So they're still in bed?" said Fred grumpily, pulling his bowl of porridge toward him. "Why can't we Apparate too?"

"Because you're not of age and you haven't passed your test," snapped Mrs. Weasley.

"Don't worry, Fred," Iliana said, "you can get your beauty sleep later."

Fred glared at her. "Like Mum or Dad might say, you're not too old to take over my knee, young missy."

Iliana giggled. "Might take you up on that later," she said suggestively, which flew right over Fred's sleepy head. And, apparently, over the head of Mr. Weasley. Mrs. Weasley, however, gave her a nasty side-eye which just made her giggle more.

Sirius came down the stairs then, dressed in a Grateful Dead t-shirt and torn jeans. He was yawning and stretching.

"What's for breakfast? I could eat a hippogriff."

"Just porridge," Iliana said.

Sirius blinked blearily at her. "Ah, Iliana I see. What happened to Addy?"

"She's in there. We just woke up as me for some reason. Dunno why."

"Alright, then," Sirius said, grabbing a bowl and some honey to mix into his porridge.

"Why did we have to get up so late, dad?" Fred asked.

"Well, we've got a bit of a walk."

"What, we're walking there?"

"No, that's miles away. We're taking a portkey, which is at the top of a hill outside the village. With so many witches and wizards in the country for the Cup, we have to be more careful than ever about how we travel, so it's a portkey for us."

"Have I used a portkey before? I don't remember."

"Yes. We took one to Egypt, remember?"

"Oh yeah. Jerk behind the navel, lots of wind, fall over when you get there?"

"That's the one."

"Lovely."

"You've been to Egypt?" Sirius asked her.

"Yeah. Last year, when you were still, er... in Azkaban."

"You'll have to tell me about it sometime. But not now, I'm barely awake now."

As soon as they were done with breakfast, Mrs. Weasley saw them all off with a smile and a hug, since she was staying behind. And so Iliana, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, Mr. Weasley, Fred, George, and Sirius trudged off toward the village. Sirius had put on a black leather jacket over his t-shirt, and Iliana noticed that his boots were dragon hide.

It was chilly and the moon was still out. Only a dull, greenish tinge along the horizon to their right showed that daybreak was drawing closer. Iliana, having been thinking about thousands of wizards speeding toward the Quidditch World Cup, sped up to walk with Mr. Weasley.

"So how _does_ everyone get there without all the Muggles noticing?" she asked.

"It's been a massive organizational problem," sighed Mr. Weasley. "The trouble is, about a hundred thousand wizards turn up at the World Cup, and of course, we just haven't got a magical site big enough to accommodate them all. There are places Muggles can't penetrate, but imagine trying to pack a hundred thousand wizards into Diagon Alley or platform nine and three-quarters. So we had to find a nice deserted moor, and set up as many anti-Muggle precautions as possible. The whole Ministry's been working on it for months.

"First, of course, we have to stagger the arrivals. People with cheaper tickets have to arrive two weeks beforehand. A limited number use Muggle transport, but we can't have too many clogging up their buses and trains — remember, wizards are coming from all over the world. Some Apparate, of course, but we have to set up safe points for them to appear, well away from Muggles. I believe there's a handy wood they're using as the Apparition point. For those who don't want to Apparate, or can't, we use Portkeys. You can do large groups at a time if you need to. There have been two hundred Portkeys placed at strategic points around Britain, and the nearest one to us is up at the top of Stoatshead Hill, so that's where we're headed."

Mr. Weasley pointed ahead of them, where a large black mass rose beyond the village of Ottery St. Catchpole.

They trudged down the dark, dank lane toward the village, the silence broken only by their footsteps. The sky lightened very slowly as they made their way through the village, its inky blackness diluting to deepest blue. Iliana's hands and feet were freezing. Mr. Weasley kept checking his watch.

They didn't have breath to spare for talking as they began to climb Stoatshead Hill, stumbling occasionally in hidden rabbit holes, slipping on thick black tuffets of grass. Each breath Iliana took was sharp in her chest and her legs were starting to seize up when, at last, her feet found level ground.

"Whew," panted Mr. Weasley, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his sweater. "Well, we've made good time — we've got ten minutes. …"

Hermione came over the crest of the hill last, clutching a stitch in her side.

"Now we just need the Portkey," said Mr. Weasley, replacing his glasses and squinting around at the ground. "It won't be big. … Come on …"

Spreading out, they began to search the hill. They'd only been searching a few minutes, though, when a voice called out at them.

"Over here, Arthur! Over here, son, we've got it!"

Two tall figures were silhouetted against the starry sky on the other side of the hilltop.

"Amos!" said Mr. Weasley, smiling as he strode over to the man who had shouted. The rest of them followed.

Mr. Weasley was shaking hands with a ruddy-faced wizard with a scrubby brown beard, who was holding a moldy-looking old boot in his other hand.

"This is Amos Diggory, everyone," said Mr. Weasley. "He works for the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. And I think you know his son, Cedric?"

Cedric Diggory was an extremely handsome boy of around seventeen. He was Captain and Seeker of the Hufflepuff House Quidditch team at Hogwarts. Iliana blushed, feeling her whole face burning.

"Hi," said Cedric, looking around at them all.

Everybody said hi back except Fred and George, who merely nodded. They had never quite forgiven Cedric for beating their team, Gryffindor, in the first Quidditch match of the previous year.

Amos noticed Sirius then, and jerked back a moment before his brain caught up with his instinct.

"Sirius Black, I presume?" He had not put his hand out.

Sirius sighed, putting his own hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. "Yes, that's me. I'm Iliana's godfather."

"Ah, that explains it." Amos then turned to Mr. Weasley again. "Long walk, Arthur?"

"Not too bad," said Mr. Weasley. "We live just on the other side of the village there. You?"

"Had to get up at two, didn't we, Ced? I tell you, I'll be glad when he's got his Apparition test. Still … not complaining … Quidditch World Cup, wouldn't miss it for a sackful of Galleons — and the tickets cost about that. Mind you, looks like I got off easy. …" Amos Diggory peered good-naturedly around at the three Weasley boys, Iliana, Hermione, and Ginny. "All these yours, Arthur?"

"Oh no. Just the- er... all but two of them."

Iliana and Hermione raised their hands.

"Ah yes, that one's hair is a different shade of red than the others. Much darker. Who are you two, then?"

"This is Hermione, a friend of Ron's," Mr. Weasley said. "Then Iliana, another friend of Ron's."

"Iliana, that name again. Name sounds familiar. Iliana Potter?" Amos asked.

"Yes, sir."

As used to people looking at their scar as they were, it still bothered them. Amos's eyes went to the scar, the only part of their appearance that never changed unless they hid it with long bangs. Nor did she really like the _other_ part of the look the adult man gave her; the look that said 'Freak; abomination.'

"Ced's talked about you, of course," said Amos Diggory. "Told us all about playing against you last year. … I said to him, I said — Ced, that'll be something to tell your grandchildren, that will. … _You beat Harry Potter_!"

Iliana glared at the man, her face hot with anger. Sirius put a gentle hand on her shoulder, which she ignored.

"But he _didn't_ beat Harry Potter," she said in a dangerously calm voice. "He didn't even _play_ _against_ Harry Potter. He played against _**me**_ , Iliana Potter. And anyway, there is no more Harry Potter. The individual formerly known as Harry James Potter is now Adira Lily Potter."

Fred, George, and Sirius scowled along with her. Cedric, for his part, looked embarrassed.

"Iliana fell off _her_ broom, Dad," Cedric said. "I told you, it was an accident."

"Yes, but _you_ didn't fall off, did you?" roared Amos genially, slapping his son on his back. "Always modest, our Ced, always the gentleman … but the best, er... person won, I'm sure that, uh, Iliana would say the same, wouldn't you, eh? One falls off her broom, one stays on, you don't need to be a genius to tell which one's the better flier!"

"Must be nearly time," said Mr. Weasley quickly, pulling out his watch again. This was fortunate, as it distracted Amos from the fact that the ground around them was heating up rapidly from the force of Iliana's anger, and also from Sirius growling at him.

"Do you know whether we're waiting for any more, Amos?"

"No, the Lovegoods have been there for a week already and the Fawcetts couldn't get tickets," said Mr. Diggory. "There aren't any more of us in this area, are there?"

"Not that I know of," said Mr. Weasley. "Yes, it's a minute off. … We'd better get ready."

Iliana's anger evaporated on the spot. "Luna's already there? She didn't say!"

Now that she thought of it, she and Luna hadn't exchanged any letters all summer. She'd been so busy she'd completely forgotten to write Luna. She hoped Luna wouldn't be hurt by this.

"Come on now, everyone, touch part of the portkey, a finger is all you need. There we are."

Sirius and Amos glowered at one another as they got into position. They had just enough time before it left for Iliana to notice how weird it would be if a Muggle spotted them all touching this manky old boot. Which is probably why they put it at the top of such a steep hill, to discourage anyone being around to see it.

Then there was that familiar jerk behind the navel, and the wild swirling of wind and color that nearly made her sick, before they fell in a heap on the ground at their destination.

"Seven past five from Stoatshead Hill," said a voice.

Iliana struggled to disentangle herself from Ron and the others. When she did, she saw they were on a large, deserted stretch of misty moor. In front of them was a pair of tired and grumpy-looking wizards, one of whom was holding a large gold watch, the other a thick roll of parchment and a quill. Both were dressed as Muggles, though very inexpertly: The man with the watch wore a tweed suit with thigh-length galoshes; his colleague, a kilt and a poncho.

 _ **How can wizards and witches be this ignorant of Muggle fashions?**_

 _I dunno,_ Adira responded to Al. _I don't think the adults get out in Muggle areas much._

Adira ignored Mr. Weasley shooting the breeze with one of the strangely-dressed wizards about work, eager to figure out where Luna was.

"Where would the Lovegoods be?" she asked when there was a gap in the conversation.

The wizard named Basil blinked at her. "Lovegoods? Why d'ya wanna know?"

"My friend Luna is a Lovegood, is why. I want to find her."

"Ah. Lovegoods, Lovegoods, let's see... they're in field fourteen. That's a few miles northwest of here."

"A few _miles_? Well, I guess I'll just have to remember to send her a letter later instead."

"Hey don't be sad, kiddo," Sirius said. "Maybe you'll run into her?"

"I doubt it, if she's so far away."

They followed Mr. Weasley to the field they were staying in, Hermione trying to comfort Iliana and not quite managing it because she was still so tired.

The field was being managed by the only real Muggle for miles, a Mr. Roberts. Iliana wasn't paying much attention until Mr. Weasley asked her help figuring out the Muggle money.

"This one's a ten? Ah yes, I see the number now. And this one's a five?"

"It's a twenty. They all have numbers on them, Mr. Weasley. It's a lot easier than the wiz—er, than our system, being a decimal system."

"Ah yes, so it is. … I don't know, these little bits of paper …"

"You foreign?" said Mr. Roberts as Mr. Weasley returned with the correct notes.

"Foreign?" repeated Mr. Weasley, puzzled.

"You're not the first one who's had trouble with money," said Mr. Roberts, scrutinizing Mr. Weasley closely. "I had two try and pay me with great gold coins the size of hubcaps ten minutes ago."

"Yes, he's foreign," Iliana told the man. "He just moved here from, er... Tajikistan."

"Your English is very good, in that case," said Mr. Roberts to Mr. Weasley.

"Yes, he had a very good English tutor before coming here. My uncle, in fact, taught him," Iliana added, privately amused at the thought of Vernon's face if he found out she'd spoken about him thus.

"Ah, so your family is housing him during his stay here?"

"Exactly."

"So can you tell me what's going on around here? There's loads more people here than I've ever seen, and a lot of 'em foreign. Weirdos, in fact."

"It's a religious and cultural event," she lied easily. "One that's only for members of a certain faith, one that's pretty popular in Tajikistan. Closed to outsiders, but it draws people from all over; other members of the faith."

"Ah, that would explain it, then. You lot have fun, then!" Mr. Roberts gave them a map of the campsite and their change, then waved them off, and they left to find their plot of land.

As soon as they were out of sight and earshot, a wizard in plus-fours Apparated in front of them, startling them all.

"Sorry about startling you," he said. "I just wanted to express my gratitude. Which one of you talked Mr. Roberts into thinking this was a cultural event for a certain religion?"

"That would be me," Iliana said. "Why?"

"Been having a lot of trouble with that one. He's needed a memory charm ten times a day to keep him happy. He might still need some later, with all the magic that's been going on, but hopefully with that explanation, he might not need as many. I must congratulate you on that clever lie, Miss. What's your name?"

"Iliana Potter."

"Potter?" he said in confusion. Then, "Oh, _Potter_! As in the Child-Who-Lived?"

"Yes, that's us."

"Well, Miss Potter, if you ever want a job, I can put in a good word for you at the Muggle Liason Office in the Ministry of Magic. We can always use knowledgeable young witches and wizards who are quick on their feet. My name's Abrams, by the way."

"Thank you, Mr. Abrams," Iliana said, shaking the wizard's hand.

"Not a problem, my dear. I'm just glad for the help. That man has needed memory charms ten times a day to keep him happy, and it's tiring. Between people using magic in plain view and Bagman in his Quidditch robes talking about bludgers, it's little wonder we're having to work so hard. Anyway, I must be going, now. Bye!"

With a wave and a pop, he Disapparated.

"I thought Bagman was head of Magical Games and Sports? Shouldn't he know better than to talk about Quidditch where Muggles can hear?"

"He should, yes," said Mr. Weasley. "but Ludo's always been a bit … well … _lax_ about security. You couldn't wish for a more enthusiastic head of the sports department though. He played Quidditch for England himself, you know. And he was the best Beater the Wimbourne Wasps ever had."

She stared at all the tents on their way there. It was no wonder the Muggles were getting suspicious, because while some tents were fairly normal but had slight mistakes like chimneys, others were quite plainly magical. A giant tent with peacocks tethered to it made her think of the Malfoys for some reason.

"Always the same," said Mr. Weasley, smiling. "We can't resist showing off when we get together. Ah, here we are, look, this is us."

They had reached the very edge of the wood at the top of the field, and here was an empty space, with a small sign hammered into the ground that read WEEZLY.

Mr. Weasley wanted to put the tent up the Muggle way. He tried roping Iliana into helping, but she had no idea.

"Here, Arthur, I'll help. I went camping once," Sirius said, going over to help.

It took several minutes, but finally they got it up. Iliana looked at the two small tents, confused how they would all fit in it.

"We'll be a bit cramped," he called, "but I think we'll all squeeze in. Come and have a look."

Iliana bent down, ducked under the tent flap, and felt her jaw drop. She had walked into what looked like an old-fashioned, three-room flat, complete with bathroom and kitchen. Oddly enough, it was furnished in exactly the same sort of style as Mrs. Figg's house: There were crocheted covers on the mismatched chairs and a strong smell of cats.

"I love magic," she said.

"Well, it's not for long," said Mr. Weasley, mopping his bald patch with a handkerchief and peering in at the four bunk beds that stood in the bedroom. "I borrowed this from Perkins at the office. Doesn't camp much anymore, poor fellow, he's got lumbago."

He picked up the dusty kettle and peered inside it. "We'll need water. …"

"There's a tap marked on this map the Muggle gave us," said Ron, who had followed Iliana inside the tent and seemed completely unimpressed by its extraordinary inner proportions. "It's on the other side of the field."

Before going out, Iliana asked questions of Mr. Weasley. As it turned out, they had two tents for a reason; boys and men in one tent, girls in the other.

"What about us?" Iliana said.

"Oh you'll be with us," said Ginny. "If Alastair comes out in the night, let us know, okay?"

"If you're okay with it, then fine."

After a quick tour of the girls' tent, which lacked the smell of cats, Ron, Iliana, and Hermione went out to get water, leaving the two adult men to try to figure out how to light a campfire without wands.

The view as they walked was fascinating. All the tents, for one, but also she was seeing small witches and wizards for the first time in examples like little kids riding toy broomsticks. There were also wizards and witches from all over the world, from African wizards cooking over a purple fire, to Americans, and beyond.

"Er — is it my eyes, or has everything gone green?" said Ron.

It wasn't just Ron's eyes. They had walked into a patch of tents that were all covered with a thick growth of shamrocks, so that it looked as though small, oddly shaped hillocks had sprouted out of the earth. Grinning faces could be seen under those that had their flaps open. Then, from behind them, they heard their names.

"Iliana! Ron! Hermione!"

They looked in the voice's direction, and saw Seamus Finnegan.

He was sitting in front of his own shamrock-covered tent, with a sandy-haired woman who had to be his mother, and his best friend, Dean Thomas, also of Gryffindor.

"Like the decorations?" said Seamus, grinning. "The Ministry's not too happy."

"Ah, why shouldn't we show our colors?" said Mrs. Finnigan. "You should see what the Bulgarians have got dangling all over _their_ tents. You'll be supporting Ireland, of course?" she added, eyeing Iliana, Ron, and Hermione beadily. When they had assured her that they were indeed supporting Ireland, they set off again, though, as Ron said, "Like we'd say anything else surrounded by that lot."

What the Bulgarians had on their tents turned out to be posters of Viktor Krum, the Bulgarian seeker. Like most wizarding photos, it moved, though just barely.

There was already a small queue for the tap in the corner of the field. Iliana, Ron, and Hermione joined it, right behind a pair of men who were having a heated argument. One of them was a very old wizard who was wearing a long flowery nightgown. The other was clearly a Ministry wizard; he was holding out a pair of pinstriped trousers and almost crying with exasperation.

"Just put them on, Archie, there's a good chap. You can't walk around like that, the Muggle at the gate's already getting suspicious —"

"I bought this in a Muggle shop," said the old wizard stubbornly. "Muggles wear them."

"Muggle _women_ wear them, Archie, not the men, they wear _these,_ " said the Ministry wizard, and he brandished the pinstriped trousers.

"I'm not putting them on," said old Archie in indignation. "I like a healthy breeze 'round my privates, thanks."

"He can wear that if he wants. I've seen Muggles wearing far stranger things than that, and I was raised by Muggles," Iliana said. "That, and he stands out far less than that man in a kilt and a poncho earlier."

The ministry wizard looked at her, exasperated, but threw up his hands and left Archie to his own business. Iliana was ignoring Hermione, who was giggling like mad.

They saw a lot of other people they knew on the way back, carrying water with them slowly and carefully. Iliana almost dropped her bucket when she saw Cho Chang all of a sudden. She blushed all the way back to the tent.

Mr. Weasley and Sirius had gotten the fire going, or rather Sirius had, once he'd gotten fed up with Mr. Weasley having too much fun with the matches. Though it was at least another hour before it was hot enough to cook anything. There was plenty to watch while they waited, however. Their tent seemed to be pitched right alongside a kind of thoroughfare to the field, and Ministry members kept hurrying up and down it, greeting Mr. Weasley cordially as they passed. Mr. Weasley kept up a running commentary, mainly for Iliana's, Sirius's, and Hermione's benefit; his own children knew too much about the Ministry to be greatly interested.

"That was Cuthbert Mockridge, Head of the Goblin Liaison Office. … Here comes Gilbert Wimple; he's with the Committee on Experimental Charms; he's had those horns for a while now. … Hello, Arnie … Arnold Peasegood, he's an Obliviator — member of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad, you know. … and that's Bode and Croaker … they're Unspeakables. …"

"They're what?"

"From the Department of Mysteries, top secret, no idea what they get up to. …"

At last, the fire was ready, and they had just started cooking eggs and sausages when Bill, Charlie, and Percy came strolling out of the woods toward them. They soon sat down to a meal together, but halfway through, Mr. Weasley was up on his feet greeting Ludo Bagman.

Iliana stared at the man, who was wearing canary yellow robes. That might get past Mr. Roberts, with the excuse she'd given him, but others would certainly not know what to make of the man, who was as exuberant in his personality as in his wardrobe.

Ludo chewed the fat with Mr. Weasley for a minute or two before Mr. Weasley introduced Bagman to Sirius and the kids. Ludo surprised her by not reacting to Sirius's name, but when they got to Iliana's name, he did the familiar flick of the eyes up to the scar.

One of the twins nudged Iliana for her attention.

"What?"

Fred said, "Would you tell Zoey to give us our Ton-Tongue Toffees now?"

She raised an eyebrow at them. "We're not supposed to use magic out here. You should've asked before we got here."

"Oh come on now, everyone else is using magic. The Obliviators are hard at work. What's the harm?"

"I don't see any reason to break the rules right now."

"Pleeeease," cajoled George. "Pretty please?"

"What do you need them for?"

"Bagman's got connections, he'd be great to show the toffees to."

"You want me to break the rules for that?"

"Well yes. It's our property, most of them."

"Transforming into Zoey and back is major magic, couldn't easily be explained away like these other things."

"That's what the Obliviators are for."

"Leave it, George, he's almost leaving."

"Ugh, fine," George said, rejoining his twin. Iliana watched them bet 37 galleons, 15 sickles, 3 knuts, and a fake wand on Ireland winning the Cup but Krum getting the snitch.

"We would've bet the toffees, too," Fred said, irritated at Iliana's non-cooperation.

"Sorry. But at least this way, if you lose, you get to keep the toffees."

"But it's a sure thing! We've been studying these teams for months!"

"Years!"

"Yes, years. Krum is a great player, but Ireland has 7 great players."

"Yeah, Iliana. I'll bet you the toffees that we're right about the outcome."

She sighed. "Okay, sure. If you're right, I'll give you the toffees which are yours anyway. And if you're wrong, I keep them. Satisfied?"

"Not really, but I accept it."

"Boys, you shouldn't be betting," Mr. Weasley said. "That's all your savings."

"It's their money, Arthur," said Sirius. "I don't think there's any laws against them gambling."

"You're right, of course. But I don't like it."

Ludo Bagman beamed as he took their money, and wrote them down in his records.

"Arthur, could you do me a favor? Do you know anyone who speaks Bulgarian? I would've asked Barty Crouch, but he got fired. My Bulgarian opposite number's making difficulties, and I can't understand a word he's saying."

"Sorry, I don't know. Dumbledore could, I think, but he's not here."

"Ah well, I'll keep asking around," Bagman said.

"Any news of Bertha Jorkins yet, Ludo?" Mr. Weasley asked as Bagman settled himself down on the grass beside them all.

"Not a dicky bird," said Bagman comfortably. "But she'll turn up. Poor old Bertha … memory like a leaky cauldron and no sense of direction. Lost, you take my word for it. She'll wander back into the office sometime in October, thinking it's still July."

"You don't think it might be time to send someone to look for her?" Mr. Weasley suggested tentatively as Percy handed Bagman his tea.

"Barty Crouch keeps saying that," said Bagman, his round eyes widening innocently, "he keeps coming over to the Ministry despite being fired, you know. But we really can't spare anyone at the moment."

Something about that name felt familiar to Iliana, but she couldn't figure out why.

A wizard Apparated in front of them, startling her. He was tall and extremely muscular, but not in a body-builder way – he was, instead, barrel-chested and had arms and legs like saplings. He wasn't nearly as tall as Hagrid, though.

"Ah, Alfonse, welcome," Mr. Weasley said. "Everyone, this is Alfonse Alder, new head of International Magical Cooperation."

"Hi there, Arthur," the large man said with a voice that was soothing and not nearly as deep as Iliana had been expecting. "I'm glad I found you. Ali Bashir is having kittens, figuratively. He wants a word with you about your ban on flying carpets."

Mr. Weasley heaved a deep sigh.

"I sent him an owl about that just last week. If I've told him once I've told him a hundred times: Carpets are defined as a Muggle Artifact by the Registry of Proscribed Charmable Objects, but will he listen?"

"I doubt it. He really wants to export here."

"Well, they'll never replace brooms in Britain, will they?" said Bagman.

"Ali thinks there's a niche in the market for a family vehicle," said Alder. "And I must say, he's got a point."

"Why can't we have flying carpets?" Iliana asked. "Just as many Muggles have brooms as carpets, after all. Maybe more."

"Yes, well, wizarding broomsticks look different from the Muggle kind. And it's not very likely for them to be on top of brooms like they would be on carpets."

"Unless they're pretending to be witches. A lot of our secrets are still banging about their culture."

"Yes, well... that's just how it is. If we had magic carpets in Britain, I'm certain we'd soon have accidents with unfortunate Muggles stepping on magic carpets and getting thrown off when it goes flying. Or worse, taking them for a ride and dropping them later."

"Ah yes, that does make sense."

"Ho there, who is this young lovely?" asked Mr. Alder, referring to Iliana.

"Er... I'm Iliana Potter."

"Potter?" he said in confusion. "Oh, like the famous Potter?"

"Yes."

Alder looked her up and down in a way that made her extremely uncomfortable. Especially since the feelings she was picking up from him, overwhelming the background crowd's emotions, were... inappropriate. She glared at the man, and pulled herself closer to Sirius, and heard Tier hiss aloud at him, making him stand back in surprise.

"Er, well... okay, Arthur. I, uh... I've told you about Ali Bashir, so, er... I'll be going now."

The man Disapparated with a crack, different from his previous pop.

Mr. Weasley looked very confused, looking back and forth between Iliana and the place Mr. Alder had been. Sirius squeezed her comfortingly, giving her a knowing look.

"I didn't like the things he was feeling about me, or the way he was looking at me," she explained to Mr. Weasley.

"What? _Oh,_ " he said, getting it at last. "Er..."

But no other words were forthcoming from Mr. Weasley, who didn't appear to know what to say.

"Don't worry, Iliana," Sirius said. "We'll have wards on the tents."

Ludo Bagman, on the other hand, seemed to still be confused. But he pushed his confusion aside when Mr. Weasley finally spoke again.

"Er, so, Ludo... I expect you'll be glad when all this is over, right? So much to do, after all."

"What? Oh no, not at all. Don't know when I've had more fun. Still, not like we don't have something else to organize afterwards, Arthur, right? And you, Peter?"

"Percy," Percy corrected. "I'm Percy."

"Sorry about that, Percy. All these new people, and me getting old. But yes, so much more to do after this, right Arthur?"

"Now now, Ludo, that's supposed to be a surprise."

"Oh come now, we can tell people. Especially this lot. It'll be happening at Hogwarts, after all."

"Ludo, don't you need to go find someone to talk with the Bulgarians for you?"

"Bah, that can wait."

"Come to think of it, Ludo, Alfonse might be able to help you with the Bulgarians."

"What? Oh, he can? Well alright, I guess so. Now where did he run off to?" Ludo asked, looking around momentarily. "Okay, I'll go find him. Just one last thing real quick: I'll be seeing you all later. You'll be in the top box with me, I'm commentating!"

With a pop, he Disapparated.

"What's happening at Hogwarts, Dad?" said Fred at once. "What were they talking about?"

"You'll find out soon enough," said , smiling.

"It's classified information, until such time as the Ministry decides to release it," said Percy stiffly. "Father was quite right not to disclose it."

"Oh shut up, Peter," said Fred.

Then, the feelings from the crowd began to change. Excitement of a subtly different sort moved in waves through the crowd, and people stopped being so careful about magic use. Salesmen started Apparating every few feet, selling souvenirs. The Ministry even started ignoring blatant magic use.

"I think we're not long now from the match," Iliana said.

"Yeah, I can feel it too," said Sirius.

"Been saving my pocket money all summer for this," Ron told Iliana as they and Hermione strolled through the salesmen, buying souvenirs. Though Ron purchased a dancing shamrock hat and a large green rosette, he also bought a small figure of Viktor Krum, the Bulgarian Seeker. The miniature Krum walked backward and forward over Ron's hand, scowling up at the green rosette above him.

"Wow, look at these!" said Iliana, hurrying over to a cart piled high with what looked like brass binoculars, except that they were covered with all sorts of weird knobs and dials.

"Omnioculars," said the saleswizard eagerly. "You can replay action … slow everything down … and they flash up a play-by-play breakdown if you need it. Bargain — ten Galleons each."

"Wish I hadn't bought this now," said Ron, gesturing at his dancing shamrock hat and gazing longingly at the Omnioculars.

"Three pairs," said Iliana firmly to the wizard.

"No — don't bother," said Ron, going red. He was always touchy about the fact that Iliana, who had inherited a small fortune from her parents, had much more money than he did.

"A pair for me, too," Sirius said behind them.

"Don't worry about it, Ron. What's the point of having money if I can't treat my friends."

"No, really-"

"If you want, this can be an early Christmas present."

Ron looked uncertain.

"And birthday present, too."

"Oh, alright then," Ron said, taking the omnioculars.

"Thanks, Iliana," Hermione said after Iliana gave her one as well. "I'll get us some programs."

"Here, pup, let me pay for yours," Sirius said.

"Oh, okay," she said, taking money from him. "I'll get a shamrock hat, too."

Everyone bedecked in rosettes and other things, some horns blew, signaling to go to the Quidditch stadium. Sirius took Iliana's arm in his, his other arm holding onto his wand.

"It's time!" said Mr. Weasley, looking as excited as any of them. "Come on, let's go!"

The match had been the most exciting thing ever for Iliana and the others. So much so that she thought they could make a corporeal Patronus, but didn't try because they weren't somewhere safe to do magic as an underage witch, like at home.

Everyone else was at least as excited as they were, especially the twins, who had won their bet with Bagman and had a lot more gold with them because of it.

" _Don't_ tell your mother you've been gambling," Mr. Weasley implored Fred and George as they all made their way slowly down the purple-carpeted stairs.

"Don't worry, Dad," said Fred gleefully, "we've got big plans for this money. We don't want it confiscated."

Mr. Weasley looked for a moment as though he was going to ask what these big plans were, but seemed to decide, upon reflection, that he didn't want to know.

They were soon caught up in the crowds now flooding out of the stadium and back to their campsites. Raucous singing was borne toward them on the night air as they retraced their steps along the lantern-lit path, and leprechauns kept shooting over their heads, cackling and waving their lanterns. When they finally reached the tents, nobody felt like sleeping at all, and given the level of noise around them, Mr. Weasley agreed that they could all have one last cup of cocoa together before turning in.

"Oh, and those veela," Fred said at one point in the conversation. "So cool!"

Hermione scoffed. "You boys, honestly. Every one of you was about to jump to your deaths if we hadn't stopped you. They shouldn't be allowed at events like that."

"Yeah," said Iliana. "I had to stomp on Sirius's foot, remember? Of course, I wasn't fully immune myself. If Al had been up front, he'd have been right there with the rest of them, I felt him being pulled forward, too."

"Wish Malfoy had jumped off," Ron said peevishly. "Security wouldn't let him die, even if his magic failed to save him, and it would be so funny to wipe that smirk right off his face."

It was only when Ginny fell asleep right at the tiny table and spilled hot chocolate all over the floor that Mr. Weasley called a halt to the verbal replays and insisted that everyone go to bed. Iliana, Ginny, and Hermione went over to their tent. Hermione hesitated, but Iliana pulled her dress over her head and slipped into her nightgown, at which point Hermione seemed to remember they had slept in the same bed once and she came to her senses and changed like nothing was wrong.

Iliana got into a bunk above Hermione, while Ginny had a bunk at a different bed. It wasn't easy getting to sleep when there were still distant noises of celebration and her mind was still full of the many different moves the players had been doing, but eventually Iliana drifted off into dreamland.

Then she saw that Indian boy from her earlier dreams again. His normal calm demeanor was gone; he looked panic-stricken, and he screamed at her to wake up.

She bolted upright, grabbing her wand holster and strapping it to her arm; she could feel panic in the air, and was certain that was what had woken her. She wondered what was going on. She slipped out of bed and was just getting her shoes on when Sirius came into the tent.

"Iliana! Hermione! Ginnny! Get your shoes on, grab your wands! Up now, it's urgent!"

"Got mine already," Iliana said as the others got their groggy way out of bed. "What's going on? A dream woke me, but I think it was my empathic sense that really woke me."

The sounds from the campsite were definitely not right. The singing had stopped. She could hear screams, and the sound of people running. She slipped down from the bunk and reached for her clothes, but Sirius – who was wearing the same t-shirt but had on sweatpants instead of his jeans – stopped her.

"No time, Addy! Grab jackets and come along!"

The three girls did as they were told, all of it. Iliana decided not to point out he'd used the wrong name; Addy _was_ easier to say than Iliana.

"Where's your wand, pup?"

She showed him the holster on her wrist. "Right in here."

"Good. You girls got yours? Come on, then. Follow me."

They scurried along, hot on Sirius's heels. He kept looking back at the three of them, as if checking they were still there. Ron and the twins soon joined along beside Iliana, looking and feeling as confused and scared as she felt.

The campsite was a shambles. A few fires still burned, enough to illuminate the scenes of chaos. Off in the distance were signs of magic, mixed with loud jeering, roars of laughter, and drunken yelling. People were running away from the source of the disturbance.

Whatever group of wizards and/or witches was responsible for this was close enough to see in the distance, now. They had wands pointing up into the sky, and were wearing hooded robes and masks. High above them, floating along in midair, four struggling figures were being contorted into grotesque shapes. It was as though the masked wizards on the ground were puppeteers, and the people above them were marionettes operated by invisible strings that rose from the wands into the air. Two of the figures were very small.

More masked people joined the group, laughing along with them and blasting tents aside, catching some on fire. Sirius pulled her in the opposite direction by her left arm without saying anything, and she let him. These wizards were dangerous, she could tell. Especially when she finally saw that they were lifting Mr. Roberts, his wife, and presumably his children in the air.

"That's sick," Ron muttered, watching the smallest Muggle child, who had begun to spin like a top, sixty feet above the ground, his head flopping limply from side to side. "That is really sick."

Bill, Charlie, Mr. Weasley, and Percy emerged from the boys' tent, fully dressed, with their sleeves rolled up and their wands out.

"We're going to help the Ministry!" Mr. Weasley shouted over all the noise, rolling up his own sleeves.

"Good. I'm taking this lot to the woods, away from the danger," Sirius said.

Mr. Weasley just nodded and lead his eldest sons away, as their own group went toward the woods.

Finally getting some of her wits about her, Iliana flicked her wand out of its wrist holster and into her hand. If that lot came after them, she knew she'd be allowed to do magic to defend herself and others, even though she was still underage.

The colored lanterns that had lit the path to the stadium had been extinguished. Dark figures were blundering through the trees; children were crying; anxious shouts and panicked voices were reverberating around them in the cold night air. Iliana felt herself being pushed hither and thither by people whose faces she could not see, but Sirius still had hold of her left arm. Then she heard Ron yell with pain.

"What happened?" said Hermione anxiously, stopping so abruptly that Iliana walked into her. "Ron, where are you? Oh this is stupid — _lumos_!"

She illuminated her wand and directed its narrow beam across the path. Ron was lying sprawled on the ground.

"Tripped over a tree root," he said angrily, getting to his feet again.

Iliana and Sirius lit their own wands, Sirius nodding approvingly at her.

"Well, with feet that size, hard not to," said a drawling voice from behind them.

Everyone turned. It was, of course, Draco Malfoy.

"You'd be the Malfoy brat, right?" Sirius growled.

Malfoy glared daggers at Sirius, but nodded.

"Good. You come with us, away from the danger."

Malfoy didn't move. He was torn, she could tell. He looked back and forth between them and the people in masks.

"Oh, let me guess," she said, "your parents are some of those masked lot?"

Malfoy's face reddened, but he didn't dare say something around Sirius. Instead, he grudgingly came with them, his arms folded petulantly, grumbling the whole way. He did his best to stay as far away from everyone else as he could, while still appearing to be with them.

"Wait, where'd Ginny and the twins go?" Iliana said.

"Damn!" Sirius cursed, looking around with his wand light. "You, Malfoy boy, did you see them?"

After pausing a moment to decide whether or not to answer, Malfoy said, "No. They weren't with you when I saw you. They must have gotten separated when Weasle-king tripped."

"Damn," Sirius growled again. "Well there's nothing else for it, we'll never find them in this crowd. Let's hope the twins can look after Ginny."

"Honestly," Ron said, "I think Ginny will be fine. She's wicked with a wand."

"Good," Sirius said, absently.

A huddle of teenagers in pajamas was arguing vociferously a little way along the path. When they saw Iliana, Ron, Draco, and Hermione, a girl with thick curly hair turned and said quickly, " _Où est Madame Maxime? Nous l'avons perdue_ —"

"Er — what?" said Ron.

At that point, Malfoy put his arms down and bowed to the girls, speaking at them rapidly in French. About the only part of it Iliana caught was "'Ogwarts."

The conversation didn't last long. When it did, the girls left.

Everyone stared at Malfoy. He glared back at them.

"What? My family have a vacation house in France, and we used to live there full time. Of course I speak French," he said derisively. "All purebloods in Britain speak French, as well as Latin, Spanish, and Italian."

"You speak all those languages?" Iliana said in awe.

"Of course," Malfoy said with a sneer.

"Enough bickering, you two. Come on," Sirius directed.

"Beauxbatons," muttered Hermione, as they went along.

"Sorry?" said Iliana.

"They must go to Beauxbatons," said Hermione. "You know … Beauxbatons Academy of Magic … I read about it in _An Appraisal of Magical Education in Europe._ "

"Oh … yeah … right," said Iliana.

"Fred and George can't have gone that far," said Ron, pulling out his wand, lighting it like Hermione's, and squinting up the path.

"Reckon they'd hear us shouting their names over all this noise?" Sirius asked.

"Doubt it," Iliana said. "Hey wait a minute, aren't you registered as an animagus with the Ministry now? You could sniff them out."

Sirius slapped his hand in disbelief. "Of _course_! Why didn't I think of that?"

"Because your power was a secret for so long."

"Right. You lot stay here, it'll make it easier for me to find you later."

They nodded. And with that, Sirius became the massive black dog, and started sniffing around the ground, following their scent back along where they'd come from.

Iliana noticed Malfoy staring at Padfoot. He noticed her staring, and glowered at her.

"What? I've never actually seen an animagus before, apart from McGonagall. It's fascinating. Figures a relative of yours would become one illegally, though."

"He's registered now."

"Yeah," Malfoy sneered, "but before that, he wasn't. Bet that's how he got out of Azkaban."

"What's it to you if... what is it, Hermione?" She stared; Hermione had been tugging on her nightgown and pointing.

Iliana looked where she was pointing. Some of the masked wizards were coming this way. It wasn't the first group they'd seen, unless the Ministry had gotten the Roberts family down.

"Damn, those morons are coming this way?"

" _Iliana,_ " Hermione said, annoyed, "those are Death Eaters. You-Know-Who's followers."

"Shit. Shit! Come on, let's go."

No longer under Sirius's eye, Malfoy smirked at them.

"Yes, Potter. Wouldn't want _her_ spotted, would you? After all, they're going after Muggles."

"Hermione is a witch, you little shitstain," she said, pointing her wand at his face. "And if you don't want me to swap the functions of all the holes in your face, you'll sod off."

He turned paler than usual, looking cross-eyed at her wand, and took off running.

"Shouldn't we stay here, though?" Hermione said. "Sirius said-"

"Sirius can find us later, the way he's finding the others. Come on, I don't feel like dueling Death Eaters, not even when they're drunk."

She grabbed Hermione by the arm and pulled her away, the others following along behind them. But the Death Eaters were already too close for comfort, and were shooting spells at them. They ducked among the trees, spells occasionally hitting a trunk with a sound like an explosion. Iliana got behind a big tree and started shooting spells back at them.

"Expelliarmus!" she shouted. Hermione and Ron joined her, behind their own trees.

It wasn't easy, dueling the Death Eaters, especially since the three of them didn't know enough dueling spells. But Alastair hadn't done all that extra DADA reading for nothing, and she was able to shoot off Stunning Spells and Impediment Jinxes alongside childish spells like the Tickling Hex.

How long they dueled, she didn't know. But at some point she felt someone trying to sneak up behind her. She turned around, but not fast enough-he hit her with something that knocked the wind out of her, and she dropped her wand in the forest debris. Luckily, Hermione shot him with a stunner before he could get her again.

Iliana forced herself to look through the forest debris for her wand, even though she could hardly breathe. It was taking forever, though, and she was getting more desperate and more terrified. Finally, though, she found it, just as another Death Eater came around behind them, shooting spells at Hermione, and she shot off the first spell she thought of.

"EXPECTO PATRONUM!" she roared.

Out came not a puff of white, but an enormous, white, glowing Chinese dragon, like the kind she'd seen in Chinese restaurants. Twice the size of an anaconda, it swam through the air and blew glowing white 'fire' at the Death Eater, who literally wet himself and ran off in the other direction.

The dragon Patronus was still chasing Death Eaters when the enormous black Padfoot bounded in and transformed back into Sirius mid-jump, shooting spells at the remaining Death Eaters. Iliana finally got over her shock and started directing the Patronus with points and shouts. Off in her peripheral vision, she saw Ginny shooting spells at them, too.

And then twenty or more adult witches and wizards in pajamas popped into the wood in a circle around the Death Eaters, joining the fray. The Ministry people were here! She recognized Mr. Weasley, Charlie, Bill, and Percy.

Recognizing they were outmatched, the Death Eaters Disapparated, so quickly that the sudden quiet was unsettling.

"They've escaped. Quick, everyone, let's secure this area," someone said.

"Secure... secure the area?" Iliana asked, breathless. "How?"

Mr. Weasley came over. "Everyone alright? Good, good. To answer your question, Iliana, they're going to make it so nobody can Apparate in. People will still be able to Apparate out, though; might as well. Looks like they all got away."

"There was one over there that I stunned, Mr. Weasley," Hermione said, pointing. He went where she looked.

"Damn. Someone must have grabbed him. He's not there anymore."

Hermione went over to check, too, seeing as she knew where he'd fallen. Even stomping around for Disillusioned people yielded nothing.

"Damn. Damn, damn, damn. I really hoped we'd catch the lot of them!" Mr. Weasley was angrier than she'd ever seen him. "Bit of a laugh for them, reminding us they wriggled out of going to Azkaban. Damn and blast!"

"I know how you feel, Arthur," Sirius said, coming over to hold Iliana's shoulders as though to make sure she was real. "Scumbags. But one or more of them saw us trying to cast anti-Disapparition charms on them, and ran away over here to continue their fun. Cowardly scumbags!"

"Is it safe to stay here?"

Mr. Weasley was going to answer, but Sirius beat him to it. "No. You and I are leaving now. I can take you side-along. Rules be damned. I'm not leaving any of you kids here after all that. Besides, Molly will be worried sick when this hits the morning Prophet."

The mention of Mrs. Weasley's mood seemed to decide Mr. Weasley into agreeing.

"Yes, quite. Let's go find the tents and retrieve them, and-"

"You do that, Arthur. You three, grab a minor and come with me back to the Burrow," Sirius said to Bill, Charlie, and Percy. He took Iliana's right arm in his left.

Nodding somberly, they agreed. Bill took Hermione, Percy took Ginny, Charlie took Ron, and Sirius took Iliana. That left Percy to take both of the twins.

"I don't think I can do more than one," he complained. "I've never done side-along Apparition before.

"I'll take one of them, then, Percy."

"Perce, I'll accompany you," Fred said.

"Right, and I'll go with Sirius," said George, taking Sirius's other arm.

"Got your wands?" Sirius asked them.

"Yes," she said, showing him the wand still in her hand. "Luckily. Almost lost it."

"Aye aye," George agreed.

"Good. Prepare yourselves," he said.

They turned around, and once again she felt like she was being squeezed through a dark rubber tube. But when they appeared at the Burrow, she managed to keep from puking. George wasn't so lucky.

Sirius looked around as if looking for enemies, but nobody else was there yet. Then with some more cracks, the others arrived at various spots behind them. Sirius lead the way back toward the house.

Whether the noise of Apparition had alerted her, or her unique clock had, Mrs. Weasley bounded out to meet them when they were halfway back. Judging by her sleepy confusion, it had been the sounds of Apparition that had woken her.

"You're back? But I thought you lot were sleeping there overnight? Wait, where's Arthur?"

"He's seeing to the tents, mother," Percy said. "There was a spot of bother at the match."

Sirius barked with sarcastic laughter. "A spot of bother my arse. It was Death Eaters, Molly. Nobody got hurt, so far as I know. At least, none of our lot did. Drunken fools were playing Float The Muggle for a bit of sick fun. Then they ran off and started attacking the kids while I was off trying to find Ginny and the twins. They held the buggers off quite admirably, especially for their age."

"I cast a Patronus!" Iliana exclaimed. "A full bodied one! I had dropped my wand, and when I found it, I defended myself and Hermione with the first spell I thought of, and it worked!"

"Death Eaters? At the match?" Molly said, clearly still a few steps behind.

"Yes, Molly. Everyone's alright. Come on, into the kitchen for some herbal tea, I think."

They all went into the kitchen, where Sirius set about making tea for everyone, and Iliana continued the tale.

"Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the Patronus. It's a dragon!"

"A dragon?" Charlie asked. "Really?"

"Yes, really."

"Fascinating," he continued. "It's not very common for wizards to have a magical creature for a Patronus. Let's see it, then; maybe I can identify it."

"Expecto Patronum!" she shouted, and the giant Chinese dragon swam into the room, startling almost everyone.

As it faded, Charlie looked stunned. "I've never seen any dragon that looked like that," he said.

"It's a Chinese dragon," she explained.

"Chinese Fireballs don't look like that."

"It's what Chinese Muggles think dragons look like," Sirius explained.

"Really? Well that's even more unusual, then. Your Patronus isn't even a real creature? Unusual indeed."

"Yeah, and what's more, I think Addy's is something else entirely. It looked a bit like a canine, nothing at all like Iliana's."

"Well, with them all being different people, I guess that makes sense. They could all have different Patronuses."

"Did you catch the Death Eaters?" Molly interrupted.

"No, Molly. They Disapparated shortly after the Ministry wizards found them again. Seemed to decide they wanted out before we overpowered them. Hermione had knocked one out already, but one of them must have grabbed him before they left. The Ministry wizards are working to secure the site to keep them from returning."

"Well that's something at least," Mrs. Weasley said, looking at her clock. Mr. Weasley's hand was pointing at 'work' now. But as they looked at it, his hand moved to 'traveling,' then 'home.'

"Oh goodness, he's back!" Mrs. Weasley bustled out to meet her husband and escort him back inside.

Mr. Weasley's only new news was that there had been no returning Death Eaters, and the Ministry was almost done securing the main portions of the site.

"Shit," Iliana said, suddenly thinking of something. "Sorry, Mrs. Weasley, Mr. Weasley, but is Luna Lovegood alright?"

"I assume the Lovegoods are fine. Nobody appears to have gotten hurt, from what the others said. Anyway, I just came back to drop off the tents. I'm going to head back over to help."

"Will you be able to get back, Arthur?"

"Yes, they've left open a small area for incoming Apparition, it's surrounded by Ministry wizards, and is only big enough for two people at a time. I'll be back by morning, Molly dear."

"Be safe, Arthur," she said, waving him off again.

She came back inside and looked around at everyone. "Right. Off to bed, the lot of you. You've been up since before dawn, it's a wonder any of you are still vertical. Come, off with you now. Shoo!"

Everyone let themselves be herded off to their different rooms, Iliana going upstairs to Ginny's room with her and Hermione.

She wanted to discuss events with the others, but as soon as she lay down in the soft bed, she felt drowsiness begin to creep in. Still, sleep didn't come; she was too awake to sleep, her mind buzzing, but too tired to talk.

Three days ago, she'd dreamed of Lord Voldemort. And now, his followers had made a scene. The two things weren't likely to be connected, but she'd had too many coincidences in her life to trust them. And then there was those dreams about that Indian boy, one of which had woken her up tonight. If their life so far was anything to go by, these things meant something. They were Significant, even if she didn't know how or why. Could it be that the Death Eaters could sense their master getting stronger? But no, that couldn't be it; they'd surely run to his side, being secretive, not making mayhem at a Quidditch match.

She was still without answers when she finally became too exhausted to stay awake any longer.


	23. Paranoia and New Friends

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 23"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-three:** **Paranoia and New Friends**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__ _and_ _ _{Tier}__ _if I ever get around to it_ _ _.__

 _ _*FAYANORA*__

Percy Weasley headed out to work the next morning after breakfast, even though it was his day off, explaining that things had gone crazy at the Ministry because of the mayhem at the match, and he felt the need to help out his boss in this hectic time. Al hoped the older boy wasn't going to overwork himself, as he ate his eggs and sausage.

It had been very awkward for him that morning, finding himself in Ginny's room with her and Hermione, even though they all had separate beds. He had poked his head out to see if anyone else was up, but the two girls were still fast asleep. Then he'd looked down at his own clothes, wondering what state they were in. To his relief, he'd found them looking like normal pajamas. So he'd very carefully slipped out, pulled some clothes out of their suitcase, and gone to the loo to change before heading downstairs.

After breakfast, he'd gone back to their suitcase, Ginny and Hermione back at the table by then. He dug some parchment and ink out of their suitcase and took it back to the table and began to doodle on the parchment while he waited for Sirius to wake up. He found to his annoyance that ink and parchment weren't great for doing art on, and decided to try to get Sirius to buy him some art supplies. They hadn't been big on art in primary school because of Dudley's tendency to rip his art to pieces, but now that was no longer a worry, he wanted to go back to it.

He'd been drawing for almost an hour when Sirius finally woke up.

"Wow, that's pretty good," Sirius commented on Al's drawing. "Who's that?"

"This is the Indian boy in that dream. Did I tell you he woke us up last night?"

"Did you? Oh wait, I remember, Iliana said a dream woke her, but we didn't have time to go into details about it."

"Yeah. He's normally really calm, almost too calm. But he was panic-stricken last night, woke us up."

"Well maybe you were dreaming about him already when the noises started, and your brain incorporated that into the dream?"

"Could be."

"You wrote something there, what's it say?"

"It says 'Chandra Rahasyamay.'"

"What's that mean?"

"No idea. Anyway, I think it's his name."

"This boy from a dream has a name?"

"Apparently. Don't know why. Don't know _how_ , either; he never said in the dreams what his name was."

"Oh. Well anyway, I need to eat something, I'm starving."

Al continued to draw as Sirius ate breakfast and talked with Mrs. Weasley. He wasn't listening to their conversation, but he did pick up on Sirius inviting the Weasleys over for dinner at their place sometime. This made him look up.

"Dinner at our place? Wouldn't that just mean we order Chinese take-away?"

"Er, maybe. At least until I get better at cooking. You ever have Chinese take-away, Molly?"

"I'm not sure. I doubt it. Those kinds of places are mostly in Muggle districts. Food from another culture, though... I think that would be worth trying. Heaven knows cooking every day and night gets a little tiresome at times. We might take you up on that sometime."

After Sirius finished his breakfast, Al got his things together and they went home.

Once they got their things home, they headed out again, meeting Mrs. Weasley at The Leaky Cauldron.

"After losing track of my wand yesterday, I was wondering if we could go to Ollivander's so I can get myself a spare wand and holster."

"Good idea. Moody would be proud of you, I'm sure he's got at least one spare wand on him. Knowing him, he probably has several."

"Do we go to Gringott's first?"

"No, Al. I have bank notes, remember? I can get your stuff that way."

"Oh yeah, right."

"If that's the case, dears," Mrs. Weasley said, "then I'll catch up with you two later. I do have to go to the bank."

Once they got into Diagon Alley, they walked together to Ollivander's, then parted ways with Mrs. Weasley, waving goodbye to her for now.

The inside of the shop was just as creepy as they remembered. But this time, Ollivander was busy with a customer, so he couldn't dramatically pop out from behind a shelf somewhere to scare them. They sat and waited until the first-year student had their first wand, applauding when she made it spark. When the wand was purchased and the girl and her mom were leaving, Ollivander turned to them.

"Ah, young Sirius Black. Dogwood, 12 inches, containing a single unicorn tail hair, correct?"

"Er, yes."

"Good, good. And who are you, my fine young man? I don't remember... wait a moment..." his eyes flicked to their scar. "Oh, I know you. Holly and phoenix feather, 11 inches. You must be one of the, er... _other_ Potters."

"Alastair Potter. We temporarily lost our wand last night at the Quidditch match while some Death Eaters were coming right toward me, and so I felt it a good idea to get a spare wand and holster. Do you sell holsters here?"

"Yes, but nothing quite as fancy as the one you're using, Alastair."

"What? How do you know-?"

"Part of my craft is being able to see magic, Mr. Potter. I could see enough of the magic around your wrist to tell that you have a very fine wrist holster there indeed. Those are very handy, of course, but they are visible to people such as myself. I suggest you go to the same shop for your spare holster, but ask for one in the Stealth-master series. They're hidden from people such as myself. Very important, in your case, as a certain You-Know-Who most likely has the same ability to see magic."

"He does?"

"Given what I have heard of his talents, I would be very surprised if he did not. By the way, for a fee, that same shop can – I understand – cast stealth spells of the same type on your current wrist holster."

"Good to know. Thanks."

"You are welcome. Now... hmm... should I skip the wands that the other Mr. Potter already tried, or do you want to try them?"

"Er... that's a good question. Skip them for now, I think."

"Good, good. Of course, I remember every one I tried you on, so I'll just go get a few for you to try."

Testing the wands didn't take nearly as long as it had the first time. Within 10 minutes, he'd found one that gave purple sparks when he waved it. It was oak and dragon heartstring, 10 inches.

"Excellent, excellent! I hope you and your new wand have a very good adventure together, Mr. Potter. Make sure to practice with it every week at least, okay? Practice makes perfect, and not all wands work the same way, so getting a feel for the new wand will be essential to using it in case of emergencies. Yes, that will be seven galleons. Ah, thank you. You two have a good day, Mr. Potter, Mr. Black."

"You too, Mr. Ollivander," Al said before they left.

After Ollivander's, they went to the wand holster shop and got the new wand a forearm holster that kept the wand above his left forearm, so he now had a wand up each sleeve. The new holster had an invisibility charm on it as well as stealth charms so that nobody would know it was there unless they felt it. The best part of this holster, though, was that the thing could open from the top to release the wand in case he couldn't slide it all the way out for some reason, which the shop owner had suggested after Al explained to him that he often got into trouble with dangerous wizards trying to hurt him.

"This way," the man had explained, "if your hands are tied behind your back and you've got limited room to move, you can get your wand without having to slide it out all the way."

Sirius had thought this just a touch _too_ paranoid, but it amused him, and it was better safe than sorry, so he didn't object to getting it for them.

After some brief stops at the apothecary and the quill shop (where Al got a fountain pen with a rounded tip), they went to Flourish and Blotts. Al spent a lot of time in here looking for advanced Defense books, among others. And he wasn't the only one; he had to hand control of his body over to others in the collective while they looked at books, too. Most embarassing had been Iliana and Adira trying to get in to look at the romance books, but those were age restricted.

 _ **I shouldn't worry too much about it,**_ Al told them. _**If you're looking for anything other than heterosexual bullshit romance, you're probably not going to find it.**_

 _How did you know that's what we were looking for?_

 _ **Well let's see, you're both bisexual. It wasn't a great leap of logic from there. Plus, you know, I can read your minds.**_

Still, they did manage to find some interesting fiction books, too. They had quite a collection by the time they were finished. He moved on to the Ancient Runes section, since they were taking that class.

While in that section, he felt eyes on him, and he turned, ready to snap at whoever it was for staring, but what he saw stopped him in his tracks and made him stare, his jaw hanging open. It was a very _pretty_ boy about age 13. Not handsome, but _pretty_. Okay, sure, handsome as well, but in a pretty way. The boy was Latino, with brown hair that was short in the back and stuck up elegantly on the top in gently curving spikes tipped in a brownish blond. His eyes were a gorgeous doe-brown, and he could see intelligence in those eyes. Eyes that had lovely long lashes.

The boy was clutching some books shyly in his arms while staring at Al; his hands, Al noticed, were slender and had immaculately clean nails. Suddenly realizing that they were both staring at one another in mutual attraction, and suddenly remembering that he was quite handsome himself, Al ran one hand semi-casually through his hair.

"Uh... hi," he said, since the other boy still seemed dumbstruck.

"Oh. Hi," the boy said in a small, quiet voice. He had a gentle Spanish accent.

"Are... are you taking Ancient Runes, too?" Al asked.

"Yes," the boy said, sounding relieved to have something to talk about. "Ancient Runes is an essential class for becoming an Artificer, and that's what I want to be when I grow up."

"Artificer? What's that?"

"They make magical objects, like pensieves, Sneak-o-scopes, secrecy sensors, omnioculars, wizarding wireless sets, and so on. Ancient Runes, Arithmancy, and Transfiguration are important for an Artificer."

"Wow, that sounds cool. I haven't given much thought yet to what I'm gonna do for a career."

"What classes are you taking?"

"Ancient Runes, Divination, and Care of Magical Creatures."

"Divination?"

"Yeah. I thought the whole subject was rubbish after the first class, but then during the test I found out I'm a bloody _seer,_ of all the crazy things!"

"You had a vision?"

"Yeah. It, er... hasn't been a hugely useful vision yet, but I think it was real."

"That's cool!"

"Er, thanks. Um... hey, what's your name? I'm Alastair. Er... Alastair Potter."

"Oh yeah, I forgot. I'm Javier Joaquin Mendoza."(*)

They shook hands. Al noted that Javier had very soft hands. They held the handshake about twice as long as usual before letting go.

"So, er... what House are you in, Javier?"

Javier turned red. Al felt his fear and worry.

"Is that really necessary?" Javier asked. "I mean, well..."

"Ah. You must be a Slytherin, then, to be that squirrelly about Houses. Don't worry, I won't hold it against you. I, er... was almost Slytherin myself, the Hat said. Luck of the draw."

Javier breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you. I was so worried it would chase you off. Yeah, I'm Slytherin. But I'm half-blood, and I don't hold with all that blood purity rubbish. Neither do my parents. My dad's a Muggleborn."

"Well that's good. I mean, even if you were a blood purist, I... I think I wouldn't mind trying to change your mind."

Javier grinned.

Sirius came over then, and spotted Al's wagonload of books.

"Buying out the whole store, are you Al?"

"Not quite. Especially since there are areas of the store we, er... we couldn't get into."

Sirius laughed and slapped his back. "Ah, I remember trying to do the same sort of thing when I was your age. Oh hello, who's this? A friend of yours?"

"I'd sure like him to be," Al said. "Sirius, this is Javier Mendoza."

"Sirius?" Javier asked. "Sirius Black?"

Sirius frowned slightly. "Yes."

"Wow! Really? That's so cool!"

"Er, pardon?" Sirius asked, confused.

Javier took Sirius's hand and pumped it excitedly.

"I'm thrilled to meet you, sir! Only person ever to escape Azkaban! And you were innocent the whole time! How'd you escape?"

"Oh, er... well... I was an illegal Animagus. I can turn into a dog. And, er..." he trailed off, looking discomfited.

"Sirius doesn't much like talking about it."

"Do _you_ know how he did it? Because dementors are supposed to sap a wizard's powers with extended exposure."

"Sirius told me that because he knew he was innocent, which wasn't a happy thought, he was able to keep his powers."

"So then he turned into a dog, slipped out between the bars, and swam to shore?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Cool! That must have been really difficult."

"Yes," said Sirius, sounding more at ease. "But I had to protect Al here from a dangerous wizard who was also an illegal Animagus."

"Peter Pettigrew, right? I heard about him. What did he turn into?"

"A rat."

Javier nodded sagely.

They continued talking as they went up to the front to pay.

"By the way, I need a new trunk. Old one's getting too full."

"Yes, I remember you mentioning that. Javier, where are your parents?"

Javier looked around.

"Oh, here comes Mom. Hi mom, this is Sirius Black and Alastair Potter."

A short, stout woman with curly black hair and the same color eyes as Javier smiled at them, shaking their hands.

"Nice to meet you at last, Mr. Black. My son talks about you and your escape all the time. He talks about a lot of things all the time. But you're one of his latest obsessions."

Al noticed her glance at him when she said this, smiling.

"Would you two like to join us to the luggage shop? I need a new trunk."

"Can we, Mom?" Javier asked pleadingly.

"Of course, dear. After that fiasco at the Quidditch World Cup, it's best to travel in groups."

The four of them walked along to the shop, Al and Javier talked the whole time. Or rather, Javier asked loads of questions about Sirius's escape, and Al answered best he could. When they got into the luggage store, though, Javier's focus changed and he began talking about all the different trunks as though he were a trunk salesman, except that he was plainly excited about it.

"How do you know all these things about trunks?" Al asked him.

"Oh, you remember I told you I want to be an Artificer? Well magical trunks aren't Artificer territory exactly, but they _can_ be."

The conversation continued on, making the salesman look at them exasperatedly. But in the end, Al went with the one that Javier recommended to him, a model that had four locks. Each lock opened a different space in the trunk, so he had to close the lid and unlock a different lock to get into another section.

He turned the key in the first lock. The trunk opened up into a decent sized room full of racks to hang robes and other clothes from. There were also several dresser drawers inside for their underwear. Using their wand, he put his name on one of them, Adira's name on another, Iliana's on the third. They could work out further details later.

The second lock was an organizer room for his school supplies like parchment, quills, ink, and so on.

Turning the third lock's key revealed a general storage area, perfect for Christmas and birthday gift storage. There was also a broom rack on the wall for their Firebolt, a hook for Hedwig's cage to hang from, and a habitat for Aqua, the grass snake that was Zoey's pet, which was at home right now.

The fourth lock opened into a library full of empty shelves, with a ladder that gave him access to the room. The library looked big enough to carry about 500 or 600 large books.

"This is the best part of the whole thing," Al said, eying the library shelves with awe. "I'll take it!"

First thing he did after buying the trunk was to put all the new stuff they'd gotten into their respective chambers. He had a lot of fun shelving the books; Javier helped him.

After putting things in the trunk, they all went back to The Leaky Cauldron for lunch. Al introduced Mrs. Weasley to Javier and his mother (whose name was Martina), once again leaving out Javier's school House. During lunch, he and Javier kept talking about this and that.

When the adults were occupied on the other end of the table, Al turned to Javier and said quietly, "Hey, so... I noticed that you didn't react to my name when I told you. I take it that means you knew already?"

"Er, yeah," Javier admitted. "I've seen you in school before. I didn't know who you were for a while, I'd just see you in the corridors sometimes. I... well, I think it's safe to say I fancied you before I even knew who you were. Er... you do know I fancy you, right?"

"Yes. Wasn't it obvious the feeling is mutual?"

Javier blushed. "Oh. Er, not to me. I'm glad to hear it."

"Good. And I'm glad to hear you fancy me, because I didn't much want to be the one to make the first move. Though I would if I had to, of course."

"Cool, cool. Er... is it too early to say we're dating?"

"Uh... I think so. Only because we haven't actually gone on a date yet, and we barely know each other."

"Would we be able to? My parents would let me, I think. They like it when I socialize. I don't really have many friends."

"I don't have any of my own friends either, really. I mean... well... how much do you know about me?"

"Are you referring to the whole, you know, thing? The thing where you've got other people in there with you? Cause I don't mind. People call me weird. I don't mind weird."

"Oh good. I was worried for a moment." He grinned.

"So you don't consider the redhead and the bushy-haired girl your friends?"

"I do. It's just... they were Adira's and Iliana's friends first. We share them. I like having someone who's friends with me before the others. It's a nice change."

"By the way... is Sirius Black your father? You two look a lot alike."

"No. It's weird, I know. He's not related to me by blood. None of us have any idea why I look like him. Except that we knew him when we were an infant, so maybe that's the reason, somehow?" He shrugged.

"Well boys, if you're all done eating, Javier and I have to go home now."

"Whereabouts do you live?" Al asked. "I want to make sure Hedwig gets the right Javier."

"We live in Devon. And you?"

"Here in London. I'm pretty sure it's findable by owl, but if I don't hear from you in a week or two, I can always send Hedwig your way. If nothing else, maybe owls can communicate with one another about addresses."

"I don't think there'll be a problem," Sirius said. "Especially since I can just shoot a letter off to Gringott's about it just in case."

"Excellent!"

Al and Javier hugged each other goodbye. Soon, Javier and his mother disappeared into the Floo.

"Sirius? Can we stop at an art store before we go home?"

"Sure thing. I'll just send the trunk home with my wand. Anyway, we still have to get your robes for the year."

"Oh yeah, forgot."

When Al and Sirius got home, Al spent an hour moving all their things from their old trunk to the new one, including all of their books. It was a wonder everything had fit in the old trunk with all the books they had. As it was, he had to un-shrink about 20 books that they'd shrunk to fit them into the old trunk, returning them to normal size before he could shelve them in his new trunk.

That done, he sat down and tried to write a letter to Javier, but he couldn't think of anything, so he started to draw instead with his new art supplies. What he ended up drawing was Javier, with little hearts in the air around him. It was a very cartoony drawing, about the same quality as his drawing of the boy from their dreams.

After a couple hours of drawing, a grey owl appeared at his window. He let it in despite it being unfamiliar, suspecting who it was from. Sure enough, Javier had sent it. The other boy must have spent a couple hours writing it, because it was a very long letter, being about 15 feet long in all, and both sides were written on. It was a lot like Javier's speaking style, a lot of info-dumps about various subjects, but there was some other stuff in there as well. He ignored, for now, the long list of fascinated questions about their multiplicity and his hopes he'd get to meet the others in the collective, and focused instead on the bits where Javier was discussing possible places to go on a date. He decided to write two different letters, the first one going back to Javier via the grey owl, whose name was Gandalf. That amused Al; someone in their household was a Lord of the Rings fan.

 _Dear Javier,_

 _I got your letter. Gandalf the grey owl, eh? Someone over there's into Lord of the Rings? Is it you? I like that book too. Though I almost didn't get past that horrible Tom Bombadil part. That passage was just so damned annoying and pointless._

 _I'm going to skip replying to most of your letter for now, so I can dedicate plenty of time to it later. I want to give it all the attention and time it deserves, which is a lot. For now I'll just say that I'm going to ask Sirius about the whole dating thing. He'll probably want to chaperone, since we barely know each other. Don't know if your parents will want to chaperone too or not._

 _Wait, what kind of a doofus am I? I'll just go ask him now. Be back in a moment._

 _Okay, moment over. I asked Sirius, which included some ideas of my own. He says he'd be okay with it, depending on what your folks say. What do you say to going out for Chinese food? My godfather and I eat out a lot, and Chinese is my favorite. Anyway, I was thinking you could come to London, since I don't know Devon, and I want us to go somewhere I know is good. Plus, my godfather is understandably a little paranoid about my safety, given our frequent run-ins with You-Know-Who and his cronies. I am, too, for that matter. So ask your folks, okay?_

 _Anyway, I'll try to have a longer response in a day or two. For now, thanks for your address; I can use that to fire-call you and your folks, to work out when we can have our the way, our own address is 23B Square Way, London._

 _Sincerely,_

 _Alastair Potter_

He re-read the letter to be sure it was good enough, and then gave it back to Gandalf to return to Javier. Hedwig looked annoyed by this.

"Hedwig, you'll be taking him the much longer letter, once I've finally written it."

This seemed to mollify her, for which he was glad.

Al really hoped that his date with Javier was going to be soon. There was, after all, less than a week until the first day of school. He hoped Javier would write or fire-call soon. While he waited, he went back to packing his things. He included the book about the Animagus transformation, too. But he used spells on it to disguise it as a very dull-sounding "Advances in Magical Theory Since the 1930's," and made it so that anyone who tried to read it that wasn't them would just see a bunch of nonsense. Then he stuck it in his trunk's bookshelf.

He pondered on how the date would go. He hadn't actually told Sirius it would be a date, just that he wanted to hang out with his new friend before school, because he didn't really know if he wanted to come out yet, as he wasn't entirely sure of his own orientation yet, and he was a little worried. It was silly, yes; they hadn't minded Adira being trans, why should this be any different? He also hadn't told either Sirius or Mrs. Weasley that his new friend was a Slytherin.

Al took one of his new books from his shelf and went to the drawing room by the hearth to read and wait for a fire-call. It was very hard to concentrate on reading as a result, especially since Sirius kept giving him odd looks. Al tried reading Sirius's emotions, but didn't know what to make of what he was sensing.

It wasn't until after dinner that the fire-call finally came. Javier's head popped into existence in the green Floo flames, and Al ran over to kneel in front of the fire. The two of them talked for several minutes, with Sirius occasionally putting in his two knuts, until they decided on going to Chinese on Saturday. Then, because he was getting uncomfortable kneeling on the hard floor, Javier ended the fire-call.

Al stood up and sat back down with his book, but didn't even try to read again. He was too keyed up, so he didn't even notice Sirius watching him this time, a thoughtful look on his face.

After an hour, Al stood up.

"I'm going to my bedroom. I need to think."

"Okay," Sirius said.

But when he got to his bedroom, Al wasn't thinking about things; he was once more going through the stuff they were taking to school. He was trying to decide whether or not to fold his underwear again when there was a knock on the door.

"What is it?" he asked.

"May I come in?"

"Yeah, okay Sirius."

The door opened up, and Sirius came in.

"So... I just wanted to tell you that, well, if there's anything you want to tell me, you can do so. I won't judge."

Al felt his cheeks warm. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, like... okay, you know what? I'm not good at this kinda thing. You like Javier, right? I don't mean as a friend. You barely know the boy, and you're way too excited about him too soon for it to be just a friend thing. Especially for you, Al. I may not know you as well as I know Adira, but she's told me some things about you, and, well... you don't trust easily. Well, you kinda do, with that heart-reading thing of yours, but you still hold back from people, you still take time to warm up to them. I can read the signs, Alastair. I think I have an idea what's going on."

"Oh?" Al said, folding his underwear in a would-be casual way. "What do you think is going on?"

"You know, wizarding society doesn't really care what people do with their sex lives as long as they get into a marriage that can produce children. Population is a problem for us, after all, so it's viewed as a societal duty among wizards to have children if they can. Beyond that, it's nobody else's business."

"It is? Well, that's nice. But, er... what does that have to do with me?"

"If you fancy this Javier boy, that's not a problem for society, and it's not a problem with me. Hell, I don't even care if you have kids or not. Do what you like. Plenty of others are having kids. If you're, well... homosexual, then you can tell me. And I'll be cool with it. In fact, I'm not exactly straight myself. I'm bisexual, in fact."

"You are?"

"Yes," Sirius said simply.

Al sighed with relief. "I am, too, Sirius. At least, I think I am."

"Ah. Well... I normally wouldn't have bothered saying anything, but I know Muggles in Britain can be weird about that sort of thing, and you were raised by some truly _awful_ Muggles, so I figured I should say something, you know what I mean?"

"Yes, I do."

"And, er... tell the others the same thing from me, okay? They can talk to me if they're not heterosexual. Or even if they are. Um... well, that's all I had to say."

"You don't mind me going on a date with Javier, then?"

"Ah... yes-I mean no, I don't mind. Just... I thought he seemed a bit keen, too. So it's officially a date, then?"

"Yeah. Kind of more a 'get to know each other better' date, than a _date_ date. You know?"

"Yes, I get it. So there's probably not going to be any snogging, then?"

"Probably not. Too soon. Maybe some hand holding. Maybe a hug or two. I mean... I don't know what his parents think."

"Given the look his mum was giving me earlier, I'd say she knows and is fine with it, too. But yeah, we don't know for sure."

"Well, you know, you and her don't have to hang around real close to us. You could talk with her at a different table while I'm with Javier."

"Might just do that. No need to cramp your style."

"Yeah," Al said, smiling.

"So... tell me more about this boy. I know you don't know everything, but you two talked enough I hope you know _some_ things. Is he in Hogwarts? You ever see him in class?"

"Yes, he's in Hogwarts. A year below me, though. So not in any classes."

"Ah, okay. Do you know what House he's in?"

Al's face turned red. "What does that matter?"

"Ah, so he's a Slytherin?" Sirius smiled.

"Er, yeah."

"Figured as much. It's the only House that would get that kind of reaction to a simple question. I don't mind, you know. I trust your judgment of people. And there are plenty of good Slytherins. Merlin was a Slytherin. Old Horace Slughorn, my Potions teacher in school, was a Slytherin. And unlike Snape, Slughorn was a jovial fellow. Your mother was his favorite student, and he knew she was Muggleborn. Slughorn likes talent, he doesn't care about accidents of birth. Well, okay, he does tend to pay more attention to kids related to famous people, but what I mean is he never showed any signs of being a blood bigot."

"Glad to hear you think that way. We almost ended up in Slytherin. In the end, though, the hat picked Griffindor."

Sirius barked with laughter.

"I'll bet the Hat had a bugger of a time with you lot! I wouldn't be surprised if you could've all ended up in different Houses, if you'd had your own bodies. I can see you as a Slytherin, Al. Not sure about Adira. Iliana seems like a Ravenclaw to me. No idea on Zoey or Tier, either."

"Heh, yeah. I think Zoey would be Griffindor for sheer nerve. Adira would be a Griffindor too, I think. But yeah, Tier is a hard one to classify."

There was a lull in the conversation.

"Well," Sirius said at last, "I'll let you finish packing, or whatever. I'm glad we had this talk."

"Likewise," Al said, putting the underwear down at last. "Actually, I need to start on this letter to Javier."

"Well I'll see you, or whoever else, in the morning. Good night."

"Night, Sirius."

Sirius closed the door, and Al went over to his desk, got out Javier's letter, and started work on his response. It would be midnight before he stopped to go to bed.

That night, they dreamed of the Indian boy again. Only this time, it was Al and Tier. Al didn't know who it was beside him at first, because Tier had never manifested his own body before, not really. But when a golden-eyed humanoid dragon-like creature stared placidly at Al without baring its teeth, it didn't remain a mystery for long.

"Tier?"

The creature nodded.

Al turned around in his seat, but the Indian boy wasn't back there. He was, instead, on Tier's other side. As soon as Tier turned to face the boy, he passed Tier a parchment with the alphabet on it, and started teaching Tier the alphabet. Tier looked offended by this, as if to say he already knew how to write. The boy nodded at this, took the parchment away, and put a blank one in its place. He handed Tier a fountain pen and ink pot. Tier took the pen uncertainly, but began to write.

 _What is your name?_ Tier's writing said.

"You already know it," the boy said.

"From my drawing?" Al asked. "You're Chandra Rahasyamay?"

"Yes."

 _What is the teacher's name?_ Tier wrote.

Chandra looked thoughtfully at Tier. Then raised his hand. The teacher came over, smelling to Al of damp earth, fragrant leaves, and the smell after a first rain, a smell called petrachor. Her skin was very, _very_ dark brown. Her hair was big and poofy, like an Afro, but it sunk a little under its weight, so Al didn't know if that still qualified as an Afro or not. But her eyes... they started out bright violet, then green, then pink, red, blue, and yellow. They didn't stay the same color for more than about five seconds at a time.

"Yes, Chandra?"

"Tier wishes to know your name."

"I have no name yet. There's never been need for one before. Tier, you and the others should think of a name."

Chandra looked annoyed. "Why can't _I_ think of a name?"

"Because you're still in school. You haven't gone out there yet. They have. They've earned it."

"But I've known you all this time."

"And for you, words and names still have little meaning. To them, though, words are very important. Names, more so."

"How are they to call on you without a name?"

"When they need me, they will name me. And in the naming, I will come." She ruffled Chandra's hair, grinning.

"And me?"

"When they need you, you will be there. You will know."

And with that, the teacher went back up to the front of the classroom.

"You're not going to jump-scare me again at the end of this, are you?"

Chandra smiled. "No. There's no longer a need for that."

"Good," Al said.

With that, Chandra smiled again, and the dream faded and Al woke up. He lay awake for a few minutes, pondering the dream, before drifting off again.

The morning of the date, Sirius was reading the Daily Prophet at the table. Al noticed the headline, which read "Death at Azkaban: Bellatrix LeStrange, Death Eater."

"Was she an especially infamous Death Eater, then? Or are deaths that infrequent at Azkaban?"

"A little of both. A lot of people do die from being around dementors too long, but it happens infrequently enough to be newsworthy. Peter's death was in the papers, too." Sirius sighed heavily.

"Something wrong?"

"Nothing. It's just... well, Bellatrix was a cousin of mine. I hated her, but she was a fellow Black. I wonder if this means I inherit her vault at Gringott's, or if it goes to Rudolphus."

"Who's Rudolphus?"

"Bellatrix's husband, Rudolphus LeStrange. Yeah, probably goes to him, even though he's in Azkaban, too. Well, something to look into, anyway." He set the paper down. "Sit down, I'll make you breakfast."

"Er..."

"Not to worry, Al. I've been practicing, I can make scrambled eggs and toast and sausages without burning anything now! Isn't that cool?"

"Yeah, it is. Okay, then."

Al sat down and took over reading the paper from Sirius, as Sirius got out eggs and sausage patties. He cooked the sausage first, because they make their own grease, which is useful for cooking the eggs in.

"You want any veggies in your scrambled eggs? I can chop onions and other veggies. I have onions, fresh spinach, mushrooms, bell peppers, and jalapeño peppers."

"Jalapeños? Cool. I'll have the lot of it, minus the bell peppers."

"Great," Sirius said, and used his wand to get the veggies out of the fridge and set the knife to chopping things up while he kept an eye on the sausages.

Al read the paper. "Is it weird that two people in Azkaban died in the same summer?"

"Yeah, a little. Especially weird that Bellatrix died. She was so proud to go to prison for trying to find Voldemort, I'd have thought it would keep her alive. You know, the hope of seeing her master again. But then, it _has_ been 13 years. Maybe she gave up hope."

Al sniffed the air. "The sausages are burning."

"They are? Damn. Oh well, so they're slightly decorated on that side. Ah... there we are now, got 'em flipped over."

"Oh god, Sirius, did you have to cut the onions so soon?" Al said, his eyes burning with the smell.

"Sorry about that, Al. Fresh onions, you know."

"When did you go to the store?"

"You were here yesterday when I said I was going to the local Tesco, remember?"

"What? Oh yeah, I recall now."

"Anyway, I was thinking about starting a garden after you go to school. It'll give me something to do while you're away."

"I know you don't need the money, Sirius, but maybe you should get a job, too, to keep you busy."

"Dunno what I'd do. I was studying to be an auror during the last war, but I don't trust the Ministry anymore. And I don't know what else I _could_ do."

"Motorcycle repair? You'd be pretty good at that."

Sirius barked with laughter. "Good idea, pup. I'd be faster than most at it, too. There are some things I could use magic on without there being any sign of magic on the bike after the Muggle got it back. Also, I could advertise in the Prophet, in case there are any other wizarding motorcycle enthusiasts in Britain. So yeah, I think I'll look into that."

"You're not going to stop practicing cooking while I'm gone, are you?"

"Nope. Quite apart from wanting to become an expert by the next holidays, I'm getting kinda tired of takeout myself. Anyway, I got myself some cookbooks recently. Next thing I'm gonna try out is stir-fry."

"That's Chinese, right?"

"It sure is. Ah, the sausage is done. Now for the eggs. Lemme just put the veggies in first..."

A few minutes later, Al was chomping at the bit with hunger, from the delicious smells from the scrambled eggs with veggies. Sirius floated the large frying pan over to the table, and tipped some eggs onto Al's plate. He tipped the rest onto his own plate, put the frying pan in the sink, and floated over the plate of sausages.

"Plate's got a warming charm on it, so don't worry about cold patties."

Al took a big bite of sausage, and started to cough. He swallowed, though, and grabbed for his orange juice, taking big gulps.

"You alright? Oh, sorry, forgot to mention the sausage is hot. I know you like hot stuff. I, er... I have mild, too, if you'd rather-"

"No, it's okay," Al said with a sore throat. "I just would've appreciated some warning."

"Sorry about that."

Al waved his concern off. "It's fine. Don't worry about it."

Now properly warned, Al was able to focus on eating. Before he did, though, he got up and got himself a glass of chocolate milk, and took some toast off the plate, since these were both good things to use with burn from spicy foods.

The rest of the morning was an agony of waiting. His "date" with Javier wasn't until 1 pm, when he'd be coming over to Al's home before they went on to the Chinese place. Al tried to read, but couldn't focus. He tried drawing, but again couldn't focus. He ended up going to the dueling room and shooting spells at the dummies, improving his speed and accuracy. But even here, his mind wandered. He wondered how good a duelist Javier was, what it would be like dueling him. Al wondered, too, if he could restart the dueling club, under a competent teacher this time. With what he knew about the prophecy and Voldemort, it would pay off to be as good a duelist as possible.

Finally, though, one o'clock rolled around, and Javier and his mother came through the Floo into the little warded area. Al ran over and opened the wards to let them through.

"Javier! Hi! And hello, Mrs. Mendoza."

"Hello to you too, Alastair," she said, smiling.

Javier smiled shyly. Al could feel the anxiety radiating from him without looking. Looking, it was even more obvious.

"You nervous?"

"Yeah," Javier admitted. "Never eaten anything foreign before."

"My Javier is a rather picky eater. He likes eating the same things a lot. Grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup for lunch, eggs over medium with toast and mild sausage links for breakfast, and he prefers dinners with lots of veggies in them."

"Well you ought to love Chinese food," Al said. "It's not dinnertime, sure, but Chinese food has lots of fresh vegetables in it. I like vegetables, too. What kinds do you like?"

"Lots of kinds. I especially love broccoli."

"Ah, then you'll probably want the beef and broccoli, that's a good one."

Before long, the four of them were heading out the building and walking to the restaurant. Al and Javier talked all the way. At first, Javier didn't say much, but when Al ran out of things to say and brought up the topic of Artificers, Javier's face lit up and he started going on at length about his passion. And Al was honestly impressed at how much the boy, only 13, knew about the craft he was going into. Javier had, apparently, even gone as far as to make some simple devices, which was N.E.W.T. level work.

"And then," Javier continued, "mama showed it to someone she knew, who showed it to someone else, a man who's a master Artificer himself, and he said if I keep up the good work, that I can become his apprentice after I graduate Hogwarts! It's so exciting! I can hardly wait!"

"Wow. That's really amazing. Sounds like you've got your future planned out already." He couldn't help feeling a little weird about that, though, when thoughts of Voldemort came into his head. If the prophecy Dumbledore had told them about was true, then he'd have to kill Voldemort, or else be killed. And that suggested to Al that he would be coming back to full power. A suggestion enhanced by that dream they'd had.

Javier was completely oblivious to Al's brief change of mood, though. He just kept talking on. But then he had to stop, because they were there, and sitting down. Al went through the options on the menu with Javier, but the younger boy had latched onto the idea of beef and broccoli so hard that he couldn't be dissuaded from that path. So, smiling, Al finally gave up and focused on trying to decide what _he_ wanted. He ended up deciding on Kung Pao Shrimp.

Despite Javier's insistence on beef and broccoli, Al did manage to get him to try a bite of Kung Pao Shrimp, warning him first that it was hot. He laughed, in the exact same manner Sirius did, when Javier found out with a shock that Al hadn't been kidding when he'd said it was very spicy, and handed Javier some milk to wash out the heat with.

Al had been worried that Javier was only capable of talking about his passions, but he did manage to get him talking about himself, by sharing some personal info of his own. Which wasn't easy to do, with all the questions Javier had about the collective. (Al still hadn't finished his longer letter. At this rate, he'd have to hand it to Javier in the hall at school.)

Among other things, he found that Javier had a cat; it was half Siamese, and half kneazle, and was named Legolas. Javier was also, according to him, hopeless at dueling. Al pounced on this as an opportunity to spend more time with his new friend, offering to help him out with dueling. He also found out that Javier was ambidextrous; he proved it to Al by writing on the back of a paper place-mat first with one hand, then with the other, then both at once. It took a lot of concentration, that last, and the going was slow, but he did it nonetheless.

There was something else, as well. Alastair was picking up on something... unusual... about his friend. Javier didn't make eye contact very much. Usually he would look off at something else, like his hands, or off into space. And whenever their eyes _did_ meet, Javier's would look away within a couple seconds, or would look somewhere _near_ Al's eyes, but never quite all the way for long. What was more, the tone of his voice was often slightly off. Sometimes he'd speak a little too loudly, other times so quietly he could barely be heard. And Javier didn't _quite_ speak in a monotone most of the time, but it very close to a monotone. It reminded Al of the times Hermione would read passages she'd memorized from books.

Al was starting to see why this boy had a hard time making friends. None of these things bothered Al, though. They intrigued him. He'd never met anyone quite like Javier, to his knowledge. He reminded Al most strongly of Hermione, but even she spoke more naturally than Javier, and nobody could put as much exasperation, frustration, or amused annoyance in their voice as Hermione could. Nobody Al had met, anyway. Still, the similarities were striking. Hermione had a tendency to info-dump the way Javier did, though she was better at knowing when to stop. But if you made it clear you were listening to her, she could go on at length about her passions, just like Javier.

"Oh, did you hear that Professor Binns isn't going to be the History of Magic teacher anymore?" Javier asked him.

"Yeah, I did. Professor Lupin is taking over the position."

"Oh. So we're getting another new Defense teacher?"

"Yeah. There's a curse on the position. If Lupin hadn't quit that position and gone to History, who knows what could have happened to him. One of them, Professor Quirrell, actually _died_."

"I heard about that from some of the other students. They weren't telling _me_ , I just happened to overhear it, but yeah. Anyway, who do you reckon the new Defense teacher will be?"

"Hope it's Snape. Then he might be gone by the end of the year."

"Or he might just switch back to Potions at the end of the year."

"There is that possibility, I suppose. Anyway, I don't know anyone else. Though... Sirius keeps mentioning his old mentor, Mad-Eye Moody. And... oh, that reminds me; I told you I found out I was a seer, remember?"

"Yeah. What about it?"

"Well that vision had in it the words 'constant vigilance,' which is apparently something Moody says a lot. And since the vision was about this coming school year, I wonder if Moody might be the new Defense teacher."

"Mad-Eye Moody? What's he like?"

"I don't know, really. You'd have to ask Sirius. All I know is he's a retired auror, and he's a little paranoid."

"So what did the vision say? Or did it have words?"

" _Chalice of wood, flame within_ ," he began reciting from memory, " _A toad will cow you with a grin. Sherry bottles litter the floor, hidden in a secret store. At Christmas time, a formal dance; beware despair, constant vigilance..._ "

A thoughtful look came over Javier's face for a few minutes. Then he snapped out of it. "Cryptic," he said. "Wonder what it all means?"

"Me too. But apparently there _is_ going to be a formal dance at Christmas time for some reason, so Sirius got me some formal robes for that. Plus, they were on our Hogwarts list."

"Oh yeah, I saw that too. Mum got me some. They're forest green with silver lining."

"Slytherin colors, eh? Mrs. Weasley helped pick out mine. She wasn't sure what to get us, since we each look different, but in the end she went with satiny black robes for me. She said if one of the girls goes instead of me, we can buy something at Hogsmeade, or have Zoey transform something for us."

"Cool. Any chance I could meet the others soon?"

"Sure. Not today, though. If I can, I'd like to finish that letter and let you read it before I introduce you to to the others. But the way we sometimes change randomly, you might run into them. Do you know what they look like?"

Javier nodded. "Yeah, I've seen them about. Which one is the redhead with hazel eyes?"

"That's Iliana. Iliana Evanna Potter."

"And the one who used to be called Harry, that's Adira?"

"Yes. Adira Lily Potter."

"Cool. Who else is there?"

"Zoey Potter is the only other one with her own appearance. She's six years old and looks it. Has one green eye and one hazel eye, and her hair is black. You might meet Tier, too. He doesn't have his own appearance; he makes modifications to whatever form the body was in before he switched. Most of the modifications aren't visible, usually."

"Nifty."

Al jumped with a start, because he'd felt his hand start to move of its own accord. Or rather, Tier's accord. It was writing something on the back of his own place-mat. Javier watched along with Al, but with fascination to contrast Al's shocked and annoyed expression.

"'Hello, friend of Alastair. My name is Tier,'" Javier read out. "Wow, so they can all hear what we're saying when we talk?"

"Er, yeah. And see what I'm seeing, and feel whatever my skin feels. We're all plugged into all the senses all the time. But I can say from experience it feels different being in the background. Like things are a little muted, kinda, since they're being filtered through someone else's consciousness first."

"Amazing. Hello there, Tier," he said, addressing the paper instead of Al's face.

Tier wrote _Hello again, friend of Alastair. Are you experiencing enjoyment with your outing?_

"Yes, I am, Tier. Wow, this is nifty."

"It's bloody weird, is what it is. I've never heard Tier say so much as a single word inside our head. I mean, I knew he could talk. When he's got control of the body, he sometimes manages to force out some words, but it's like getting blood out of a stone. He's more eloquent than I thought he was."

 _I have a great many surprises in store for you, doubtless,_ Tier wrote. _I am unsure as to why my words in the shared internal space never appear, nor why I struggle to speak in my version of the body. But I assure you, I am not unintelligent. Just because I am bestial does not mean I am a beast._

"Huh," Al said. "I guess Chandra really _was_ teaching Tier to write in that dream."

"Chandra? Who's that?"

"It's a boy who only appears in these dreams we keep having. He's got Indian heritage, I think. India Indian, not Amerindian, though he does have an American accent. I'm starting to think he's a new member of the collective. Well, new to us anyway. To hear him tell it, he's been around the whole time, quietly watching without being detected by any of the rest of us."

"Wow, a new person to meet. Being friends with you is like a six-in-one deal! Which isn't why I wanted to be friends, but it's a plus."

 _{...hello?}_ Al heard in his head.

 _ **Who's that?**_

 _{...me...me... Hello? Are you...ing...e?}_

 _ **Whoever you are, you're cutting out, like a radio with bad reception.**_

 _{...ier... BLAST! ...ing th... Scheiße! …}_ Al then heard banging noises, like someone hitting a radio. _{Can you hear me now?}_

 _ **Er, yes. Who are you?**_

 _{I am Tier, of course. It would appear I have somehow managed to fix the communication problem.}_

 _ **Tier? Wow. Three years of silence from you in here, and then Chandra teaches you to write in a dream, and suddenly you're talking in here?**_

 _{Silly person. He did not teach me to write. I already knew how. It was symbolic; it represented him transferring something else into my person, a general ability to communicate where it was not there before. It will not be easy. I do not think I will be able to speak aloud yet, but at least now I can be heard at long last!}_ Al could hear Tier laughing with relief, internally.

 _ **Was that you banging on something?**_

 _{That banging sound? That was not me.}_

 _ **Ugh. Let me guess, Chandra?**_

 _{I believe so.}_

"Huh," Al said. "Well, it would appear something Chandra did during that last dream is affecting repairs to Tier's communication ability. He's finally able to speak in our head, to us."

"So does that mean you're right? Chandra is a member of your collective?"

"Apparently so."

"But he hasn't come out yet?"

"Nope, not yet. Dunno if he will or not."

"Neat. I just hope he doesn't pop up now, I don't want our time together curtailed."

"Me neither."

Javier grinned bashfully and put his hand on Al's. Al felt his heart racing at this simple gesture. He put his other hand on Javier's. The two boys looked each other in the eye. Javier held Al's gaze for a surprisingly long time before looking away, his face turning red.

Al saw an image in his mind's eye, sent to him by Tier, of a calm ocean suddenly erupting into a large wave and crashing against a rock. Not knowing quite what to make of this image, he ignored it.

Sirius watched Al and his new friend surreptitiously from across the room as he made idle chit-chat with Martina. It was interesting to him how someone like Al could take to someone else so quickly and so powerfully, but he was glad for his... godson? He supposed that was the right term for Al.

"They look like they're having a good time," Martina said to him.

"That they do." He sighed. "Something as simple as holding hands, and they're that happy."

Something in his voice clued her in on his mood. "You're a handsome man, Sirius, you will find someone to be with."

"Yeah. But it's not going to be easy, having spent 12 years in prison for a crime I didn't commit. Everyone knows I'm innocent now, but still..."

"Just don't give up hope."

"I won't. If anything, those two give me hope."

"Amen to that. I am so glad Javier is making a friend that I don't even mind that he's already dating at 13. I'm just happy that he's happy."

Sirius nodded absentmindedly.

They all went back to the flat after dinner, and instead of Javier going home right away, he and Al spent time talking in the drawing room for several hours. Then they went to the Dueling Room and tried dueling. Javier, intelligent as he was, was horrible at dueling. Truly terrible. He couldn't do a shield charm at all, and half the time he froze, not able to think of a jinx to cast. When he _did_ think of one to cast, he didn't duck or dodge and got hit before he could finish casting his own jinx. But he kept wanting to try, kept getting back up. The one time he managed to hit Al with a jinx, it was a complete accident; he'd tripped on a loose nail and fell out of the way of Al's jinx mid-cast, finished casting on the way down, and even then, the spell barely touched Al's left arm.

"Well," Al said, "that wasn't the worst I've ever seen. The worst I've ever seen was Lockhart, who tried casting a shield charm and dropped his wand. But you win second worst place, Javier."

"Sorry. I just... I can't think under pressure."

"You're just not used to this kind of magic. We'll have to get you used to it. Listen, I'm gonna ask Dumbledore if we can restart the Dueling Club with a competent teacher. If he says yes, you should join up. You could sure use the practice."

"Okay, I think I will, if only to spend more time with you this year."

"Heh, yeah. Between us being in different years, and me being several people in one body, that's gonna put a real crimp in our relationship. But we'll manage."

"Javier?" his mother said from the doorway. "It's getting late, sweetheart. We need to go home."

"Okay, mum." He turned to Al and sighed. "Well, I guess I'll see you on Monday, on the school train."

"I'll see if we can meet up before the train, maybe go to the station together, so we can be sure to get a compartment together. Then I can introduce you to Ron and Hermione."

"Cool! I usually end up shoved into the corner ignored by everyone else. Maybe this time will be different."

"It _will_ be different, because I'm not going to ignore you. And no matter who I wake up as tomorrow or Monday, if I have to strong-arm Zoey into switching me back to the front for the train, I will."

Javier smiled. "Cool! Thank you."

"Javier," his mother said in a reminding tone.

The two boys hugged briefly, then Al guided Javier back to the Floo.

"Sirius? Mrs. Mendoza?" Al said. "Can we meet up together here on Monday and go to the train together?"

"Fine by me," Sirius said. "Martina?"

"I'll ask my husband, and send you an owl with his response."

The boys smiled. This out of the way, they said their final goodbyes, and Al watched them leave through the green flames of the Floo. He stood there staring for a few moments, then went back to his room to try to distract himself with more school preparations.

As mixed luck would have it, Mr. Mendoza did not agree to meeting up at Sirius's flat, but Al was still Out, and they met before the train left. Javier stuck his head out a window of the train to wave at Al. Al waved back, and took his stuff down the train corridor to the compartment Javier had found for them.

They sat together waiting for the train to board, Al keeping most people out of the compartment.

"Hermione, over here!"

"Al?"

"Yep, it's me."

"Oh good, you found us a compart- oh hello, who's this?"

"Hermione Granger, meet my new friend and possible boyfriend, Javier Mendoza."

Javier held out his hand. Hermione took it and smiled. "Nice to meet you, Javier. I'm sure I'll want to hear all about you two, but first I have to put my stuff away." Then she put her trunk away and sat down on Javier's other side.

As the train began to move, and heavy rain began to hit the window panes, they heard a small ruckus at the door. Ron was struggling to get his trunk and owl cage and his owl Arnan into the compartment. The cage was covered with an ugly maroon piece of cloth, with moldy lace on it.

"Hey Ron," Al said. "What's that?"

"Oh, Arnan was getting upset, so I covered his cage with my... with the dress robes mum got me. Hideous things, I hate them."

"Well maybe Zoey can do something about them later."

"Really? That'd be a huge help."

Ron finally looked up and spotted Javier.

"Who're you?"

"Ron, this is my new friend and possible boyfriend, Javier."

"Boyfriend? You, er... you're...?"

"Bisexual. I think. Not entirely sure yet."

"Ah, okay. Wait... when you say 'your' boyfriend...?"

"Mine. Al's. Nobody else's."

"Right. Gotcha. Hi, Javier."

Javier waved shyly. "Hi Ron."

Hermione beamed. "So tell me about yourself, Javier. What House are you in? How did you two meet? And did you say boyfriend, Al?"

"Yes. Well, we're still getting to know one another, but we're both smitten with each other, so yeah, by the end of the week I'll probably be calling him my boyfriend for sure."

Hermione nodded, waiting for him to continue.

"We met less than a week ago, but he'd had his eye on me for a long time before we met. When I first saw him, I was gaga over him."

Hermione giggled. "Love at first sight?"

Al blushed. "Maybe. Certainly fancying at first sight, at least. Anyway, we met in Diagon Alley. At Flourish and Blott's, specifically."

Ron snorted. "Figures you'd meet someone in a book shop, Al. Anyway, what House're you in, Javier?"

Javier blushed, looking down at his feet.

"He's Slytherin. And he's half-blood, not a blood bigot. If you don't like it, Ron, tough luck."

"Oy, I never said anything!"

"Yeah, but you hate Slytherins on principle. But a whole House full of kids can't all be bad, or even most of them."

"Alright, alright, keep your hair on. Anyway, if you trust him, I do too. I know you're an excellent judge of character." Ron held a hand out to Javier. "Ron Weasley."

Javier took Ron's hand with a smile. "Javier Mendoza."

When Ron took his hand back and settled down, he turned to Al. "Hey Al, you won't believe what happened this morning! Dad had to go out to work early because Mad-Eye Moody got into some legal trouble. Something about dustbins rocketing around spewing garbage. Mad-Eye says an intruder set them off. Dad's gonna try getting him off on a lesser charge. Had to, apparently; Mad-Eye is starting some new job soon."

"Weird. I hear he's kinda paranoid," Al said.

Ron snorted. "That's putting it lightly. Anyway, Al, you should've heard my family talking a little bit ago. There's gonna be something going on at Hogwart's this year. No idea what it is, though."

"Oh, do you mean the Triwizard Tournament?" Javier asked.

Ron blinked at him. "Er... do I? I dunno. What is it?"

"Oooh," said Hermione. "The Triwizard Tournament? I read about that in 'Hogwarts: A History.' It's when the three major magic schools of Europe – Hogwarts, Beauxbaton, and Durmstrang – used to come together every few years to compete against each other. They stopped doing it a long time ago, because of all the deaths."

"Yeah, that's the one," Javier said. "My mum found out they're doing it again for the first time in ages this year. They've changed some of the rules, though, to make it safer. Dunno how, exactly. Guess we'll find out later."

"Shhh," Hermione warned gesturing toward the compartment next to theirs. Everyone present began to listen, and heard a familiar voice drawling in through the still-open door.

"… Father actually considered sending me to Durmstrang rather than Hogwarts, you know. He knows the headmaster, you see. Well, you know his opinion of Dumbledore — the man's such a Mudblood-lover — and Durmstrang doesn't admit that sort of riffraff. But Mother didn't like the idea of me going to school so far away. Father says Durmstrang takes a far more sensible line than Hogwarts about the Dark Arts. Durmstrang students actually _learn_ them, not just the defense rubbish we do. …"

Hermione got up, tiptoed to the compartment door, and slid it shut, blocking out Malfoy's voice.

"So he thinks Durmstrang would have suited him, does he?" she said angrily. "I wish he _had_ gone, then we wouldn't have to put up with him."

"So where is this Durmstrang?" Al asked, absentmindedly popping his wand in and out of its wrist holster.

"Nobody knows, do they?" said Hermione, raising her eyebrows.

"Er — why not?" asked Al.

"There's traditionally been a lot of rivalry between all the magic schools. Durmstrang and Beauxbatons like to conceal their whereabouts so nobody can steal their secrets," said Hermione matter-of-factly.

"Come off it," said Ron, starting to laugh. "Durmstrang's got to be about the same size as Hogwarts — how are you going to hide a great big castle?"

"But Hogwarts _is_ hidden," said Hermione, in surprise. "Everyone knows that … well, everyone who's read _Hogwarts, A History,_ anyway."

"Just you, then," said Ron. "So go on — how d'you hide a place like Hogwarts?"

"It's bewitched," said Hermione. "If a Muggle looks at it, all they see is a moldering old ruin with a sign over the entrance saying DANGER, DO NOT ENTER, UNSAFE."

"So Durmstrang'll just look like a ruin to an outsider too?"

"Maybe," said Hermione, shrugging, "or it might have Muggle-repelling charms on it, like the World Cup stadium. And to keep foreign wizards from finding it, they'll have made it Unplottable —"

"Come again?"

"Well, you can enchant a building so it's impossible to plot on a map, can't you?"

Al snorted. "Are you forgetting the Marauder's Map? Kinda disproves your theory."

"Not at all. The Map doesn't show where Hogwarts is, just what the inside looks like. I don't think it even shows how far it is from Hogsmeade."

"Oh. Damn, you're right. Hadn't thought of that."

"But I think Durmstrang must be somewhere in the far north," said Hermione thoughtfully. "Somewhere very cold, because they've got fur capes as part of their uniforms."

"Ah, think of the possibilities," said Ron dreamily. "It would've been so easy to push Malfoy off a glacier and make it look like an accident. … Shame his mother likes him."

"Yeah, I don't like him either," Javier said. "By the way, don't share my blood status too widely, I don't want Malfoy finding out if I can help it."

"My lips are sealed," Ron said.

As the rain got heavier, Luna came around to their compartment.

"Hi Luna."

"Hello, Al." She turned her protruberant eyes toward Javier. "Hello, stranger."

"Luna Lovegood, meet Javier Mendoza."

"He's Al's _boyfriend_ ," Ron said teasingly, making smoochy noises after. Al glared at him but started cracking up with laughter.

Several of their friends looked in on them as the afternoon progressed, including Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas, and Neville Longbottom, a round-faced, extremely forgetful boy who had been brought up by his formidable witch of a grandmother. Seamus was still wearing his Ireland rosette. Some of its magic seemed to be wearing off now; it was still squeaking " _Troy — Mullet — Moran_!" but in a very feeble and exhausted sort of way. After half an hour or so, Hermione, growing tired of the endless Quidditch talk, got into a discussion with Javier that led to him going on about Artificing.

Neville listened jealously to the others' conversation as they relived the Cup match.

"Gran didn't want to go," he said miserably. "Wouldn't buy tickets. It sounded amazing though."

"It was," said Ron. "Look at this, Neville. …"

He rummaged in his trunk up in the luggage rack and pulled out the miniature figure of Viktor Krum.

"Oh _wow,_ " said Neville enviously as Ron tipped Krum onto his pudgy hand.

"We saw him right up close, as well," said Ron. "We were in the Top Box —"

"For the first and last time in your life, Weasley."

Draco Malfoy had appeared in the doorway. Behind him stood Crabbe and Goyle, his enormous, thuggish cronies, both of whom appeared to have grown at least a foot during the summer. Evidently they had overheard the conversation through the compartment door, which Dean and Seamus had left ajar.

Al glared at Draco. He was _not_ in the mood for this.

"Weasley … what is _that_?" said Malfoy, pointing at Arnan's cage. A sleeve of Ron's dress robes was dangling from it, swaying with the motion of the train, the moldy lace cuff very obvious.

Ron made to stuff the robes out of sight, but Malfoy was too quick for him; he seized the sleeve and pulled.

"Look at this!" said Malfoy in ecstasy, holding up Ron's robes and showing Crabbe and Goyle, "Weasley, you weren't thinking of _wearing_ these, were you? I mean — they were very fashionable in about eighteen ninety."

"Eat dung, Malfoy!" said Ron, the same color as the dress robes as he snatched them back out of Malfoy's grip. Malfoy howled with derisive laughter; Crabbe and Goyle guffawed stupidly.

"Those are just the base material, Malfoy. Zoey is going to transform them for him. Now why don't you leave before I have her turn your face into your arse? Or, hmm... no, I guess it's too late for that."

Malfoy glared at Al. Then, looking around the compartment, his eyes landed on Javier.

"You! You're a Slytherin! What are you doing here with all these bloody Griffindors?"

Javier froze, unable to speak.

Malfoy sneered. "Oh yes, I remember you. You're that quiet weirdo, never looks anyone in the eyes."

"Javier is my boyfriend, Draco, and if you don't leave now, I am going to hex your mouth and eyelids shut. Permanently."

As he said that, he stood up, moved his hand up towards Malfoy's face, and popped his wand out of its holster so it stopped an inch from Malfoy's face, making the blond boy jerk back in shock.

"Or maybe I'll hit you with a Hair-Loss Hex?" Al said.

"F-fine, P-Potter, okay, we'll leave, we'll leave. Come on, you two," he said, tugging on Crabbe's and Goyle's robes.

When the three of them were gone, Al sat back down.

"Cool holster, Al!" Dean said.

"Thanks. My godfather got it for me."

"Sirius Black, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Cool!"

Dean, Seamus, and Neville left not long after. Luna got out an issue of The Quibbler and read it. Hermione had gotten out a book to read. Ron was still upset about Malfoy's slight on his dress robes and was sulking. Al leaned up against Javier and closed his eyes.

"Boyfriend now already? Or were you just saying that to get at Malfoy?"

"A little of both. I know you well enough now to call you my boyfriend."

"You know the whole school will know now, right?"

"I don't mind at all."

"The famous Potter, scion of Griffindor, dating a Slytherin snake?"

"Well, I _am_ a Parselmouth. It won't be _too_ big a surprise at this point. And anyway, anyone who doesn't like it can kiss my arse."

After a few moments of silence, Javier whispered into his ear, "The only one kissing your arse will be me."

He tried to restrain his laughter, and failed. He let out a huge snort, then barked with laughter, then rolled up into a hearty belly-laugh. And then, because he didn't want to explain what Javier had said, he went back to controlling his laughter.

Hours later, Al woke up still leaning against Javier. As it turned out, Hermione had woken them up so everyone could change into their school robes; the train was nearing Hogsmeade. Groggily, he pulled his robes on over his other clothes and began heading off of the train, knowing the house elves would bring their stuff up to the room for them. He _did_ notice Hermione grab her cat Crookshanks, though.

"Heya, Hagrid," Al yelled at the man's silhouette so he'd be heard over the downpour of rain.

"All righ', Al?" Hagrid bellowed back, waving. "See yeh at the feast if we don' drown!"

First years traditionally reached Hogwarts Castle by sailing across the lake with Hagrid.

"Yeah, I'm glad I'm not doing that this year."

They all piled into carriages fast as they could to get out of the rain. Javier and Al ended up squished up against Hermione and Ron.

"Didn't you say you have a cat?" Al asked Javier.

"Yes. Legolas. But he doesn't like traveling, so he's home."

"Sounds like Bilbo would have been a better name," Al said, laughing.

Javier laughed, too. So did Hermione. Ron and Neville just looked clueless.

"Legolas and Bilbo are characters in a novel called Lord of the Rings," Al explained. "I have a copy, I'll have to loan it to you."

"You have room in your trunk for novels?" Hermione said, amazed.

"Er, yeah. I have a new trunk. The old one was getting stuffed. The new one holds every book I own, all my school stuff, and all our assorted clothes with room to spare. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and has four compartments."

"Wow, Al, that must be really expensive."

"Er, yeah. But better than having to leave most of my stuff behind. Mind you, I kept the old one in case anyone needs one."

"You think I could use it, then, Al?" Ron said, clearly saying this against his pride. "Later, I mean. Mine is very old and not in great shape. Mum keeps repairing it with her wand, but the material itself is falling apart, so there's only so much she can do with it."

"Sure, I can give it to you over the Christmas holidays."

"Okay, sounds good."

The carriage rolled to a halt, and they all got out and headed for the entrance, rushing inside. Even so, Al was wary of Malfoy getting revenge for earlier, so he got his main wand out and went in cautiously. This caution helped him, because he got to avoid a water-bomb Peeves threw at him and others. With his wand, he caught one of the water bombs in midair and sent it back to Peeves, who twirled out of the way, clutching his feet and laughing. He shot a spell he'd read about at Peeves, one designed to fight poltergeists, and Peeves flew away through a wall.

He and Javier hugged in the entrance hall before going into the Great Hall, since they were going to different tables. Even when he sat down, Al kept looking over his shoulder at his boyfriend.

The Great Hall looked its usual splendid self, decorated for the start-of-term feast. Golden plates and goblets gleamed by the light of hundreds and hundreds of candles, floating over the tables in midair. The four long House tables were packed with chattering students; at the top of the Hall, the staff sat along one side of a fifth table, facing their pupils. It was much warmer in here.

The three of them had sat down next to Nearly Headless Nick, the Gryffindor ghost. Pearly white and semitransparent, Nick was dressed tonight in his usual doublet, but with a particularly large ruff, which served the dual purpose of looking extra-festive, and insuring that his head didn't wobble too much on his partially severed neck.

"Good evening," he said, beaming at them.

"Says who?" said Ron, taking off his sneakers and emptying them of water. "Hope they hurry up with the Sorting. I'm starving."

Just then, a highly excited, breathless voice called down the table.

"Hiya, Al!"

It was Colin Creevey, a third year to whom they were something of a hero.

"Hi, Colin," said Al warily.

"Al, guess what? Guess what, Al? My brother's starting! My brother Dennis!"

"Er — good," said Al.

"He's really excited!" said Colin, practically bouncing up and down in his seat. "I just hope he's in Gryffindor! Keep your fingers crossed, eh, Al?"

"Er — yeah, all right," said Al. He turned back to Hermione, Ron, and Nearly Headless Nick. "Brothers and sisters usually go in the same Houses, don't they?" he said. He was judging by the Weasleys, all seven of whom had been put into Gryffindor.

"Oh no, not necessarily," said Hermione. "Parvati Patil's twin's in Ravenclaw, and they're identical. You'd think they'd be together, wouldn't you?"

Al looked up at the high table, and smiled to see Lupin again, looking disheveled as always. There were empty spaces for Hagrid and the DADA teacher. McGonagall's seat was also empty.

"Where's the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?" asked Hermione, looking anxious. "Do you think they couldn't get one this year?"

"I reckon it's Mad-Eye Moody," Al said nonchalantly.

Hermione, Ron, and the Weasley twins all stared at him.

"What makes you think that?" George asked.

"Between Ron saying Mad-Eye had a new job, and my vision at the end of last year, well... it makes sense."

"Wow, I hope you're right. Moody sounds cool."

Still groggy from his nap on the train, Al propped his head up on one elbow and stared in the direction of the Slytherin table. His mind vaguely noticed Malfoy spreading the news about him and Javier. He barely even noticed Javier, truthfully; he just wanted to eat and go to bed.

 _ **Bed. Private room. Invisibility cloak,**_ he thought. He felt a delicious smile creep across his face at the thought. _**Not tonight, obviously, but... eventually.**_

 _Do I want to know?_

 _ **Don't get your knickers in a twist, Addy, I'd only be snogging him. Nothing sexual.**_

 __ _Well, alright then,_ Adira answered back.

Al gave a start; someone had poked him in the side.

"What is it, Hermione?"

"You missed the Hat's song. Wake up or you'll miss the Sorting."

"Meh," he said. "Smart, Brave, Evil, or Miscellaneous. It's a stupid system."

"Have it your way, then."

"He's only saying that because he's tired," Al felt Adira say with his mouth.

"Who was that?" Ron asked.

"Addy," he said, his head sinking lower. "Gods, at this rate I'm gonna have to just hoover it all up and nap til everyone else finishes."

"What does 'hoover it up' mean?" Ron asked.

Al put his head down into his folded arms and groaned.

"I'll explain it later," Hermione told Ron.

Al must've nodded off during the Sorting, because soon Hermione was poking him awake again. His head shot up and he said, "I'm awake!"

Once the Sorting was over, the food appeared. It was all Al could do to keep himself awake enough to get food onto his plate and then into his mouth. He didn't pay any attention to the conversation, though he did jump and stare at Hermione after she spilled her drink. He'd get the recap on that later.

He continued to drift through Dumbledore's speech. The man was just about to explain why there was no Quidditch this year when there was a deafening roar of thunder and the door of the Great Hall banged open. This got his immediate attention; he was awake and alert and his wand was in his hand, pointing at the intruder.

A man stood in the doorway, leaning upon a long staff, shrouded in a black traveling cloak. Every head in the Great Hall swiveled toward the stranger, suddenly brightly illuminated by a fork of lightning that flashed across the ceiling. He lowered his hood, shook out a long mane of grizzled, dark gray hair, then began to walk up toward the teachers' table.

A dull _clunk_ echoed through the Hall on his every other step. He reached the end of the top table, turned right, and limped heavily toward Dumbledore. Another flash of lightning crossed the ceiling. Hermione gasped.

The lightning had thrown the man's face into sharp relief, and it was a face unlike any Al had ever seen. It looked as though it had been carved out of weathered wood by someone who had only the vaguest idea of what human faces are supposed to look like, and was none too skilled with a chisel. Every inch of skin seemed to be scarred. The mouth looked like a diagonal gash, and a large chunk of the nose was missing. But it was the man's eyes that made him frightening.

One of them was small, dark, and beady. The other was large, round as a coin, and a vivid, electric blue. The blue eye was moving ceaselessly, without blinking, and was rolling up, down, and from side to side, quite independently of the normal eye — and then it rolled right over, pointing into the back of the man's head, so that all they could see was whiteness.

The stranger reached Dumbledore. He stretched out a hand that was as badly scarred as his face, and Dumbledore shook it, muttering words Al couldn't hear. He seemed to be making some inquiry of the stranger, who shook his head unsmilingly and replied in an undertone. Dumbledore nodded and gestured the man to the empty seat on his right-hand side.

The stranger sat down, shook his mane of dark gray hair out of his face, pulled a plate of sausages toward him, raised it to what was left of his nose, and sniffed it. He then took a small knife out of his pocket, speared a sausage on the end of it, and began to eat. His normal eye was fixed upon the sausages, but the blue eye was still darting restlessly around in its socket, taking in the Hall and the students.

"May I introduce our new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?" said Dumbledore brightly into the silence. "Professor Moody."

It was usual for new staff members to be greeted with applause, but none of the staff or students clapped except Dumbledore and Hagrid, who both put their hands together and applauded, but the sound echoed dismally into the silence, and they stopped fairly quickly. Everyone else seemed too transfixed by Moody's bizarre appearance to do more than stare at him.

"Ha! Al, you were right!"

Al had put his wand back, but stared at Moody. It was difficult from this distance, to get a heart-read on the man. He'd have to try again later.

"What happened to him?" Hermione whispered. "What happened to his _face_?"

"Dunno," Ron whispered back, watching Moody with fascination.

Moody seemed totally indifferent to his less-than-warm welcome. Ignoring the jug of pumpkin juice in front of him, he reached again into his traveling cloak, pulled out a hip flask, and took a long draught from it. As he lifted his arm to drink, his cloak was pulled a few inches from the ground, and Al saw, below the table, several inches of carved wooden leg, ending in a clawed foot.

Dumbledore cleared his throat, and began to tell about the Triwizard Tournament. Of those near Al, only the Weasley twins were surprised by this announcement, thanks to Javier earlier.

"You gonna try out for the Tournament?" Ron asked.

"I'd rather have burning slivers of metal shoved under my fingernails while Malfoy sharpens a knife on my leg bones. There's enough danger in my life without adding more on purpose."

"But they're making it safer! And there's glory and gold!"

"I have more than enough gold. I don't give a tinker's cuss about the glory. I'll tell you what, if you want to put your name in, I'll help you. But I would rather join Voldemort's side as a Death Eater than be in that bloody tournament."

At every House table, Al could see people either gazing raptly at Dumbledore, or else whispering fervently to their neighbors. But then Dumbledore spoke again, and the Hall quieted once more.

"Eager though I know all of you will be to bring the Triwizard Cup to Hogwarts," he said, "the heads of the participating schools, along with the Ministry of Magic, have agreed to impose an age restriction on contenders this year. Only students who are of age — that is to say, seventeen years or older — will be allowed to put forward their names for consideration. This" — Dumbledore raised his voice slightly, for several people had made noises of outrage at these words, and the Weasley twins were suddenly looking furious — "is a measure we feel is necessary, given that the tournament tasks will still be difficult and dangerous, whatever precautions we take, and it is highly unlikely that students below sixth and seventh year will be able to cope with them. I will personally be ensuring that no underage student hoodwinks our impartial judge into making them Hogwarts champion." His light blue eyes twinkled as they flickered over Fred's and George's mutinous faces. "I therefore beg you not to waste your time submitting yourself if you are under seventeen.

"The delegations from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang will be arriving in October and remaining with us for the greater part of this year. I know that you will all extend every courtesy to our foreign guests while they are with us, and will give your whole-hearted support to the Hogwarts champion when he or she is selected. And now, it is late, and I know how important it is to you all to be alert and rested as you enter your lessons tomorrow morning. Bedtime! Chop chop!"

"Ugh, October. I loathe October," he said to Hermione as they stood up to leave. "Our parents died on Halloween, a troll was loose in the dungeons on Halloween our first year here, the Chamber of Secrets nonsense started on Halloween, and last year on Halloween, Sirius attacked the Fat Lady. So amend that: I hate Halloween. Maybe they'll get here early in October, and Halloween will be good this year. And maybe we'll all split off into our very own bodies and be somewhat normal for the rest of our days." He sounded far less than optimistic about these things.

"Anyway, Ron, Dumbledore's right. I'm only 14. Sure, I'm a bit ahead of the curve, but I couldn't compete against 16 or 17 year olds."

"Oh sure you could, you've done difficult and dangerous things before."

"Not by choice. And like I said, I would rather become a Death Eater than be in that damned tournament. That isn't hyperbole, either. If fate finds some way to force me into that stupid thing, I'm gonna march right out the damn door, find Moldywart, and swear my allegiance to him."

"You won't be able to get in without entering, Al."

"With our luck, I wouldn't bet on that. You mark my words, I'm gonna end up getting roped into that shit-show against my will somehow. Maybe I should leave school now and get a private tutor instead."

Ron laughed, clearly not convinced that Al was doomed to be forced into the Tournament.

"Who's this impartial judge who's going to decide who the champions are?" said George.

"Dunno," said Fred, "but it's them we'll have to fool. I reckon a couple of drops of Aging Potion might do it, George. …"

"Dumbledore knows you're not of age, though," said Ron.

"Yeah, but he's not the one who decides who the champion is, is he?" said Fred shrewdly. "Sounds to me like once this judge knows who wants to enter, he'll choose the best from each school and never mind how old they are. Dumbledore's trying to stop us giving our names."

"People have died, though!" said Hermione in a worried voice as they walked through a door concealed behind a tapestry and started up another, narrower staircase.

"Yeah," said Fred airily, "but that was years ago, wasn't it? Anyway, where's the fun without a bit of risk? Hey, Ron, what if we find out how to get 'round Dumbledore? Fancy entering?"

"Sure. Be cool to enter, wouldn't it? But I s'pose they might want someone older. … Dunno if we've learned enough. …"

"I definitely haven't," came Neville's gloomy voice from behind Fred and George.

"I expect my gran'd want me to try, though. She's always going on about how I should be upholding the family honor. I'll just have to — oops. …"

Neville's foot had sunk right through a step halfway up the staircase. There were many of these trick stairs at Hogwarts; it was second nature to most of the older students to jump this particular step, but Neville's memory was notoriously poor. Al and Ron seized him under the armpits and pulled him out, while a suit of armor at the top of the stairs creaked and clanked, laughing wheezily.

"If you ask me, Neville," Al said, "your gran ought to be proud of the grandson she has, not the one she wants."

"Oh. Er... thanks."

"That reminds me, didn't you say you use your dad's wand?"

"Y-yeah. Why?"

"Because the wand chooses the wizard, Ollivander said. That thing is probably holding you back. You should get a new wand at Ollivander's. You can come with me and Sirius sometime, if your gran won't come with you. I must've tried every wand in the shop before I found the one for me, so I really doubt that wand is suited to you. Why are you using it anyway? It looks brand new. Shouldn't your dad be using it, still?"

"He can't anymore," Neville said quietly.

"Oh. Sorry about that, I didn't know. But I mean it, you need your own wand."

Neville shrugged. "Yeah, maybe. I guess it's worth a try."

They made their way up to the entrance to Gryffindor Tower, which was concealed behind a large portrait of a fat lady in a pink silk dress.

"Password?" she said as they approached.

"Balderdash," said George, "a prefect downstairs told me."

The portrait swung forward to reveal a hole in the wall through which they all climbed. A crackling fire warmed the circular common room, which was full of squashy armchairs and tables. Hermione cast the merrily dancing flames a dark look, and Al distinctly heard her mutter " _Slave labor,_ " before bidding them good night and disappearing through the doorway to the girls' dormitory. He was _really_ gonna have to ask what that was all about, later.

Before long, he was in his bedroom. He tore his clothes off, opened his trunk, pulled on his pajamas, and fell into bed. He was asleep before he was all the way down.

Note: "Javier" is pronounced Hahv-ee-air, "Joaquin" is pronounced Wah-keen. (Joaquin is also Spanish for Phoenix.) Pronunciation of "Mendoza" is pretty easy to figure out. Anyway yeah, my tendency to make Good Slytherin OC's has bled over from the Aspie Potter/Trouble With Neurotypicals fic over to this one. I always hated how Rowling treated the Slytherins in the books.

Note two: Dunno if there's a street called Square Way in London or not, but then again, I doubt there's a Grimmauld Place there or a Little Whinging in Surrey, either.

Note three: Yes, I made up Sirius's wand. The wikia says his wand details are unknown. I went with the existing theme. :-)


	24. School Daze

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 24"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-four:** **School Daze**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 **Note 3:** I have different styles for the internal speech of _**Alastair** , Adira,_ and _Zoey_ , and now _# ** **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**** **.** #_ and _{Tier}_ if I ever get around to it.

 **Note four:** This chapter contains descriptions of two boys snogging ("making out"). Nothing terribly graphic, just sweet and romantic. Just thought I'd give you a heads up.

 **Note five:** I want to point out that Javier has Asperger's syndrome. I think that's important to know. I don't know if he knows yet or not, probably not. But I hope to bring a diagnosis into the story at some point. I've done this because our own collective has Asperger's as well, but I didn't really want to go out of my way to give the Potters that in this one, too, especially since my other HP series – Harry Potter and the Trouble With Neurotypicals – centers around an aspie Harry. Of course, I probably accidentally give all my characters autism, because I'm autistic, just as characters by allistics tend to be allistic by default. I can never be sure how well I'm doing at trying to write an allistic character, especially when autistic people come in many varieties, too. (Not all aspies are super-smart nerds, and not all aspies are introverts, as a couple examples. I live with a very extroverted aspie. I haven't met any stupid aspies yet, to my recollection, but I know they exist.)

I bring this all up because at least one commenter had some feelings about Javier that were likely caused by Javier being an aspie. In our culture, allistic (non-autistic) people tend to view things like 'not making eye contact' to mean the person is lying or untrustworthy, when the opposite is true for most aspies. Being an aspie doesn't automatically make you a good person, but we do tend to be honest to a fault, and bad at lying.

Also, aspies and auties tend to give allistic people an 'uncanny valley' type sensation. Being aware of this possibility helps. Oh, and something I want to point out before I get off my soapbox, something very few people take into consideration: allistic people give us aspies and auties the 'uncanny valley' sensation as well.

Or maybe it was just anti-Slytherin sentiment. I dunno. But I like covering all possibilities.

 **Note six:** Last note, I promise. Anyway, I was planning on the Triwizard Tournament starting here, but it got a bit long, so I split this chapter into two.

 _ _*FAYANORA*__

The dramatic weather was back to its normal calm the next morning as Al got out of bed, glad to see he was still himself. He went down to the Great Hall for breakfast and found Ron and Hermione looking over their new course schedules. As he sat down, McGonagall handed him his schedule.

"Today's not bad … outside all morning," said Ron, who was running his finger down the Monday column of his schedule. "Herbology with the Hufflepuffs and Care of Magical Creatures … damn it, we're still with the Slytherins. Er... not that all Slytherins, I mean..."

Al waved his concern off airily. "Javier is in the year below us. I don't know what the Slytherins in our year are like, but they can't be too great if they don't tell Malfoy off."

"Ah, okay."

"Ugh. Double Divination this afternoon," Al groaned, looking down. Despite having found out he was a seer – or maybe because of it – he still hated that class and found it largely useless, as the teacher had all the talent of a teaspoon, except for two real prophecies in her entire lifetime, one of which they were still trying to puzzle out.

"Useless, the way that woman teaches it," Al said before Hermione could say anything about it. "I need to find an actual seer – one who knows what they're doing – to learn from."

"You're eating again, I notice," said Ron, watching Hermione adding liberal amounts of jam to her toast too.

"I've decided there are better ways of making a stand about elf rights," said Hermione haughtily.

"Yeah … and you were hungry," said Ron, grinning.

"What's all this, now?"

"Oh yeah, you were snoozing last night. Well, at the feast last night, Sir Nicholas mentioned house elves in the castle, and Hermione here nearly had a fit, since they're slaves, apparently. She didn't eat all night, like she thought eating their food would reverse the fact they worked hard at it anyway. Which she's plainly given up on, now."

"Ah, that explains it." He thought for a moment on that. There was some thought there struggling to get out, but he couldn't work it out, so he gave up.

Their first class was Herbology with the Hufflepuffs. They arrived in greenhouse three, and soon Professor Sprout was showing the class the ugliest plants Al had ever seen. Indeed, they looked less like plants than thick, black, giant slugs, protruding vertically out of the soil. Each was squirming slightly and had a number of large, shiny swellings upon it, which appeared to be full of liquid.

As it turned out, this liquid was pus, that smelled highly of petrol. They were expected to collect this weird pus so it could be used to treat acne, even though it seemed to cause the skin to erupt in boils when undiluted.

The pus was disgusting, of course. But it gave him an idea. He surreptitiously conjured a vial and cork, and squirreled away a sample for later. Sure, she'd said it was valuable, but he had plenty of money, so that's not why he wanted it. He had an idea that it might be useful against Malfoy.

When Herbology was done, they went to Hagrid's for Care of Magical Creatures. Al was dreading this class. He loved Hagrid, he did, but the man had a penchant for the monstrous. It had been mostly okay last year, when Hagrid had been worried about the health of one of his hippogriffs that Malfoy had attacked, and thus had switched to animals that Hagrid thought were boring, but who knew what fresh horrors they'd have to face this year?

Hagrid was standing outside his hut, one hand on the collar of his enormous black boarhound, Fang. There were several open wooden crates on the ground at his feet, and Fang was whimpering and straining at his collar, apparently keen to investigate the contents more closely. As they drew nearer, an odd rattling noise reached their ears, punctuated by what sounded like minor explosions.

"Mornin'!" Hagrid said, grinning at Al, Ron, and Hermione. "Be'er wait fer the Slytherins, they won' want ter miss this — Blast-Ended Skrewts!"

"Come again?" said Ron.

Hagrid pointed down into the crates.

"Eurgh!" squealed Lavender Brown, jumping backward.

Al looked at the skrewts. He could see what Lavender meant, they were hideous. Like deformed, shell-less lobsters, pale and slimy-looking. Their legs were weird, too, and they didn't appear to have heads. But then, earthworms didn't appear to have heads, either.

There were about a hundred of them in each crate, each about six inches long, crawling over one another, bumping blindly into the sides of the boxes. They were giving off a very powerful smell of rotting fish. Every now and then, sparks would fly out of the end of a skrewt, and with a small _phut,_ it would be propelled forward several inches.

"On'y jus' hatched," said Hagrid proudly, "so yeh'll be able ter raise 'em yerselves! Thought we'd make a bit of a project of it!"

"And why would we _want_ to raise them?" said a cold voice.

The Slytherins had arrived. The speaker was Draco Malfoy. Crabbe and Goyle were chuckling appreciatively at his words.

Hagrid looked stumped at the question.

"I mean, what do they _do_?" asked Malfoy. "What is the _point_ of them?"

Al had some possible answers for that question, but as that might tip Malfoy off, he said nothing.

Hagrid opened his mouth, apparently thinking hard; there was a few seconds' pause, then he said roughly, "Tha's next lesson, Malfoy. Yer jus' feedin' 'em today. Now, yeh'll wan' ter try 'em on a few diff'rent things — I've never had 'em before, not sure what they'll go fer — I got ant eggs an' frog livers an' a bit o' grass snake — just try 'em out with a bit of each."

Al hesitated. He didn't know if he loved Hagrid enough to stick his hand in gross things to try feeding the skrewts. He wasn't even sure if they _could_ eat, as they didn't appear to have any mouths. There was a suspicion deep inside him that the things just ate magic. Magic could add mass or volume to things that were transfigured, after all; maybe the skrewts added mass and/or volume to themselves magically. But he tried to feed them anyway, just in case they did have some unidentified means of eating.

It soon became apparent that their names were well earned; every now and then, their ends exploded, which could get you a nasty burn if you weren't careful. Luckily, they'd just come from herbology, and Al was able to put his dragon-hide gloves on, protecting him from burns.

"Eurgh!" said Lavender Brown again. "Eurgh, Hagrid, what's that pointy thing on it?"

"Ah, some of 'em have got stings," said Hagrid enthusiastically (Lavender quickly withdrew her hand from the box). "I reckon they're the males. … The females've got sorta sucker things on their bellies. … I think they might be ter suck blood."

Al thought about that. He didn't know what made Hagrid think that, but Al thought it might be backwards. What if the suckered ones were the males, using the sucker to stick to a female? The stinger could be to protect the young, which would naturally go to the mother. Or maybe they didn't have a clear gender binary, or were just all weird mutants.

"Well, I can certainly see why we're trying to keep them alive," said Malfoy sarcastically. "Who wouldn't want pets that can burn, sting, and bite all at once?"

"Just because they're not very pretty, it doesn't mean they're not useful," Hermione snapped. "Dragon blood's amazingly magical, but you wouldn't want a dragon for a pet, would you?"

Of course, Al and Ron knew Hagrid _did_ want a pet dragon; he'd had one once. But this shut Malfoy up.

"Well, at least the skrewts are small," said Ron as they made their way back up to the castle for lunch an hour later.

"They are _now,_ " said Hermione in an exasperated voice, "but once Hagrid's found out what they eat, I expect they'll be six feet long."

"Well, that won't matter if they turn out to cure seasickness or something, will it?" said Ron, grinning slyly at her.

"You know perfectly well I only said that to shut Malfoy up," said Hermione. "As a matter of fact I think he's right. The best thing to do would be to stamp on the lot of them before they start attacking us all."

"Or better yet, smuggle some into Malfoy's bedroom and dump them on him," said Al.

At lunch, Hermione hoovered her food up with remarkable speed, to give herself time to go to the library for some side project of her own. Al didn't ask; he wasn't sure he wanted to know, and he had a suspicion this had something to do with her sudden obsession with house elf rights.

When the bell rang to signal the start of afternoon lessons, Al and Ron set off for North Tower where, at the top of a tightly spiraling staircase, a silver stepladder led to a circular trapdoor in the ceiling, and the room where Professor Trelawney lived.

The familiar sweet perfume spreading from the fire met their nostrils as they emerged at the top of the stepladder. As ever, the curtains were all closed; the circular room was bathed in a dim reddish light cast by the many lamps, which were all draped with scarves and shawls. Al and Ron walked through the mass of occupied chintz chairs and poufs that cluttered the room, and sat down at the same small circular table.

 _ **I'm gonna smell like a French whorehouse after this class, with all this perfume,**_ Al thought.

 _Don't be crass,_ Adira answered him.

"Good day," said the misty voice of Professor Trelawney right behind Al, making him jump.

A very thin woman with enormous glasses that made her eyes appear far too large for her face, Professor Trelawney was peering down at Al with the tragic expression she always wore whenever she saw him. The usual large amount of beads, chains, and bangles glittered upon her person in the firelight.

"You are preoccupied, my dear," she said mournfully to Al. "My inner eye sees past your brave face to the troubled soul within. And I regret to say that your worries are not baseless. I see difficult times ahead for you, alas … most difficult … I fear the thing you dread will indeed come to pass … and perhaps sooner than you think. …"

He was going to snort with laughter, but then he thought about his worries about getting caught up in the Triwizard Tournament somehow, and that stopped him. She was just guessing, of course, but just because she wasn't a seer didn't mean she couldn't also be clever. It wouldn't take much to fake a good guess like that; talk to some of the portraits about things they'd overheard, then take a bet that your dire predictions might turn out to be true in the end. So no, he decided to pay her no heed unless she started talking in that weird voice that signaled a real prophecy. He didn't need any more detentions with her, so he just glared at her.

Professor Trelawney swept past them and seated herself in a large winged armchair before the fire, facing the class. Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil, who deeply admired Professor Trelawney, were sitting on poufs very close to her.

"My dears, it is time for us to consider the stars," she said. "The movements of the planets and the mysterious portents they reveal only to those who understand the steps of the celestial dance. Human destiny may be deciphered by the planetary rays, which intermingle …"

Al let his mind wander as he tuned her out. But as it turned out, his mind was feeling too lazy to wander, and just sat down and stared off into space along with him. Between the bubotubers and the skrewts, he was kind of tired, and the hot perfumed air wasn't helping. To give himself something to stare _at_ , he was staring at the fire in the grate, watching the colors as it flickered. His brain unfocused, and images started to dance at the edge of his thoughts-

"Al!" Ron said, jerking Al out of his trance.

"What?"

Al looked around; the whole class was staring at him. He sat up straight; he had been almost dozing off, lost in the heat and his thoughts.

"I was saying, my dear, that you were clearly born under the baleful influence of Saturn," said Professor Trelawney, a faint note of resentment in her voice at the fact that he had obviously not been hanging on her words.

"Born under — what, sorry?" said Al.

"Saturn, dear, the planet Saturn!" said Professor Trelawney, sounding definitely irritated that he wasn't riveted by this news. "I was saying that Saturn was surely in a position of power in the heavens at the moment of your birth. … Your dark hair … your mean stature … tragic losses so young in life … I think I am right in saying, my dear, that you were born in midwinter?"

"No," said Al, "I was born in July."

Ron hastily turned his laugh into a hacking cough.

"Yes, perhaps your _body_ was born in July, my dear," she said, recovering quickly, "but who's to say when _you_ were born? You and the others, I mean. You could all have different star signs, you know, depending on what time of year you came into existence."

"You might have a point there," he said, leaving out the thought of 'And if you part your hair just right...' before continuing. "But first of all, there's not really any way of knowing when each of us came into being. Secondly, your prediction sounded like it applied to the whole lot of us – students in general. So pardon me if I take it with a whole salt lick of salt."

This didn't seem to affect her, for she still smirked at him, which was annoying. But that wasn't his only reason for being annoyed. As they got their assignments – a complicated star chart – he was angrily thinking about why he was annoyed. He'd nearly had another vision, he knew it. He'd somehow stumbled back into the mentality needed for a vision, again. It was something he'd been trying to re-create for months, and he'd found it again, only to be woken up. And now he was sure it wouldn't happen again, since part of him would be trying for it, and it seemed to be one of those things like an image in the peripheral vision that disappeared when you tried looking right at it.

What was even more annoying, was the thought of 'Maybe there's something to the mystic atmosphere in this room after all?'

The star chart was dull work, requiring much consultation of timetables and calculation of angles.

"I've got two Neptunes here," said Al after a while, frowning down at his piece of parchment, "that can't be right, can it?"

"Aaaaah," said Ron, imitating Professor Trelawney's mystical whisper, "when two Neptunes appear in the sky, it is a sure sign that a midget in glasses is being born, Al."

Seamus and Dean, who were working nearby, sniggered loudly, though not loudly enough to mask the excited squeals from Lavender Brown — "Oh Professor, look! I think I've got an unaspected planet! Oooh, which one's that, Professor?"

"It is Uranus, my dear," said Professor Trelawney, peering down at the chart.

"Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender?" said Ron.

Most unfortunately, Professor Trelawney heard him, and it was this, perhaps, that made her give them so much homework at the end of the class.

"A detailed analysis of the way the planetary movements in the coming month will affect you, with reference to your personal chart," she snapped, sounding much more like Professor McGonagall than her usual airy-fairy self. "I want it ready to hand in next Monday, and no excuses!"

Ron was complaining about Trelawney, and Al was ignoring him. The near-vision was still heavy on his mind. Hermione was talking, too, but he didn't hear her, either.

They reached the entrance hall, which was packed with people queuing for dinner. They had just joined the end of the line, when a loud voice rang out behind them.

"Weasley! Hey, Weasley!"

Al, Ron, and Hermione turned. Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle were standing there, each looking thoroughly pleased about something.

"What?" said Ron shortly.

"Your dad's in the paper, Weasley!" said Malfoy, brandishing a copy of the _Daily Prophet_ and speaking very loudly, so that everyone in the packed entrance hall could hear. "Listen to this!

 **FURTHER MISTAKES AT THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC**

 _It seems as though the Ministry of Magic's troubles are not yet at an end, writes_ Rita Skeeter, Special Correspondent. _Recently under fire for its poor crowd control at the Quidditch World Cup, and still unable to account for the disappearance of one of its witches, the Ministry was plunged into fresh embarrassment yesterday by the antics of Arnold Weasley, of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office."_

Malfoy looked up.

"Imagine them not even getting his name right, Weasley. It's almost as though he's a complete nonentity, isn't it?" he crowed.

Everyone in the entrance hall was listening now. Malfoy straightened the paper with a flourish and read on:

 _Arnold Weasley was yesterday involved in a tussle with several Muggle law-keepers ("policemen") over a number of highly aggressive dustbins. Mr. Weasley appears to have rushed to the aid of "Mad-Eye" Moody, the aged ex-Auror who retired from the Ministry when no longer able to tell the difference between a handshake and attempted murder. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Weasley found, upon arrival at Mr. Moody's heavily guarded house, that Mr. Moody had once again raised a false alarm. Mr. Weasley was forced to modify several memories before he could escape from the policemen, but refused to answer_ Daily Prophet _questions about why he had involved the Ministry in such an undignified and potentially embarrassing scene._

"And there's a picture, Weasley!" said Malfoy, flipping the paper over and holding it up. "A picture of your parents outside their house — if you can call it a house! Your mother could do with losing a bit of weight, couldn't she?"

Ron was shaking with fury. Everyone was staring at him.

Al felt his wand hand itching to wield his wand.

"Malfoy, if you're going to be an insufferable little shit, I think I'll transfigure your hair into horse shit."

"Oh yeah, Potter, you've stayed at his house before, haven't you? Tell me, is she really that porky, or is it just the picture?"

"You know _your_ mother, Malfoy?" said Al — both he and Hermione had grabbed the back of Ron's robes to stop him from launching himself at Malfoy — "that expression she's got, like she's got dung under her nose? Has she always looked like that, or was it just because you were with her?"

Malfoy's pale face went slightly pink.

"Don't you dare insult my mother, Potter."

"Oh, so you're free to make fun of other people's mothers, but yours is off limits? I don't think so. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If you go low, I'm going to go low too, maybe even lower. So you ought to keep your big fat mouth shut, you little worm." Al said, then turned around dismissively.

BANG!

Several people screamed — Al felt something white-hot graze the side of his face — he had his wand out so fast it was in his hand before he consciously recognized this fact. But already there was a second loud BANG, and a roar that echoed through the entrance hall.

"OH NO YOU DON'T, LADDIE!"

Al spun around. Professor Moody was limping down the marble staircase. His wand was out and it was pointing right at a pure white ferret, which was shivering on the stone-flagged floor, exactly where Malfoy had been standing.

There was a terrified silence in the entrance hall. Nobody but Moody was moving a muscle. Moody turned to look at Al — at least, his normal eye was looking at Al; the other one was pointing into the back of his head.

"Did he get you?" Moody growled. His voice was low and gravelly.

"No," said Al, "missed."

"LEAVE IT!" Moody shouted.

"Leave — what?" Al said, bewildered.

"Not you — him!" Moody growled, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Crabbe, who had just frozen, about to pick up the white ferret. It seemed that Moody's rolling eye was magical and could see out of the back of his head.

Moody started to limp toward Crabbe, Goyle, and the ferret, which gave a terrified squeak and took off, streaking toward the dungeons.

"I don't think so!" roared Moody, pointing his wand at the ferret again — it flew ten feet into the air, fell with a smack to the floor, and then bounced upward once more.

"I don't like people who attack when their opponent's back's turned," growled Moody as the ferret bounced higher and higher, squealing in pain. "Stinking, cowardly, scummy thing to do. …"

The ferret flew through the air, its legs and tail flailing helplessly.

"Never — do — that — again —" said Moody, speaking each word as the ferret hit the stone floor and bounced upward again.

"Professor Moody!" said a shocked voice.

Professor McGonagall was coming down the marble staircase with her arms full of books.

"Hello, Professor McGonagall," said Moody calmly, bouncing the ferret still higher.

"What — what are you doing?" said Professor McGonagall, her eyes following the bouncing ferret's progress through the air.

"Teaching," said Moody.

"Teach — Moody, _is that a student_?" shrieked Professor McGonagall, the books spilling out of her arms.

"Yep," said Moody.

"No!" cried Professor McGonagall, running down the stairs and pulling out her wand; a moment later, with a loud snapping noise, Draco Malfoy had reappeared, lying in a heap on the floor with his sleek blond hair all over his now brilliantly pink face. He got to his feet, wincing.

"Moody, we _never_ use Transfiguration as a punishment!" said Professor McGonagall weakly. "Surely Professor Dumbledore told you that?"

"He might've mentioned it, yeah," said Moody, scratching his chin unconcernedly, "but I thought a good sharp shock —"

"We give detentions, Moody! Or speak to the offender's Head of House!"

"I'll do that, then," said Moody, staring at Malfoy with great dislike.

Malfoy, whose pale eyes were still watering with pain and humiliation, looked malevolently up at Moody and muttered something in which the words "my father" were distinguishable.

"Oh yeah?" said Moody quietly, limping forward a few steps, the dull _clunk_ of his wooden leg echoing around the hall. "Well, I know your father of old, boy. … You tell him Moody's keeping a close eye on his son … you tell him that from me. … Now, your Head of House'll be Snape, will it?"

"Yes," said Malfoy resentfully.

"Another old friend," growled Moody. "I've been looking forward to a chat with old Snape. … Come on, you. …"

And he seized Malfoy's upper arm and marched him off toward the dungeons.

Professor McGonagall stared anxiously after them for a few moments, then waved her wand at her fallen books, causing them to soar up into the air and back into her arms.

"Don't talk to me," Ron said quietly to Al and Hermione as they sat down at the Gryffindor table a few minutes later, surrounded by excited talk on all sides about what had just happened.

"Why not?" said Hermione in surprise.

"Because I want to fix that in my memory forever," said Ron, his eyes closed and an uplifted expression on his face. "Draco Malfoy, the amazing bouncing ferret."

"Yeah, something new to threaten him with," Al said. "And here was me thinking about using bubotuber pus on him."

Al could hear Zoey laughing fit to burst in the back of their shared mind. It made him smirk.

"He could have really hurt Malfoy, though," she said. "It was good, really, that Professor McGonagall stopped it —"

"Hermione!" said Ron furiously, his eyes snapping open again, "you're ruining the best moment of my life!"

Hermione made an impatient noise and began to eat at top speed again. It seemed she was going to the library again.

Curious, Al shoveled down his own food and took off to follow her, leaving Ron behind. It took him some work to find her in the library, but soon enough he did, and he sneakily got to where he could read over her shoulder with some difficulty, without being spotted. What he saw made him decide to reveal himself. He stepped forward and gave a slight cough. She jumped, and spun around.

"Al! What are you- are you spying on me?"

He shrugged. "I was curious. S.P.E.W., eh? You do know that sounds like 'Spew,' right?"

"I-"

"Perhaps you should change it to..." he pondered a moment, before continuing. "I dunno... H.E.L.F.? - House Elf Liberation Front. A group that sounds like vomit isn't going to be very popular, whereas H.E.L.F. is one letter away from 'help.'"

"Oh. Yes, that does sound better. Good thing I haven't finished the badges yet. I think I can fix them easily enough."

There was that nagging thought that was struggling to find words for itself again. It was rather annoying. But he was missing some vital piece of the puzzle, some key that would unlock the struggling thought, so he ignored it again.

"So, house elf rights, eh?"

She nodded. "Yes. They cook our food, clean our laundry, do a load of other cleaning and stuff, and they aren't paid! They're slaves! It isn't right!"

"True. But, well... they are rather small creatures. And domesticated creatures tend to get bigger than their wild counterparts unless specifically bred for small size. Anyway, I've found from reading about history that enslaved peoples usually find a way to fight for their freedom. I suppose magic probably complicates that, but... well, I have to wonder if elves started working for humans to get protection from the dangers out in the wilderness."

"Al! Are you defending their enslavement? After Dobby?"

"I don't know. But you've never even met Dobby. And I only know one house elf." AHA! There was that thought, finally! "We should probably speak with the elves before presuming to speak on their behalf. Find out what they want. After all, they're not humans, and while they can think as well as humans, they might not think the same way we do, or value the same things. Not even all humans think the same way as most other humans. The centaurs are obsessed with star-gazing and don't much make sense to humans. I think I read somewhere that Goblins consider art or craft work to be owned by the artist, even when humans think they've bought it, kinda like copyright, but extending to more things.

"Then the, er... the basilisk doesn't think like humans, either," he continued. "I just think it's a bit... misguided... to presume to speak for a species neither of us knows very well. We don't know how house elves think, or what they value. The ones in the fairy tales I remember liked working for people, as long as they were treated well."

"Yes, Al, but the ones in the fairy tales were paid."

"Right. With cream, was it? That's what you give elves and fairies in the folklore, anyway. Also they made clothes for the elves in the stories. But here, giving clothes to a house elf frees them. A sock was all it took to free Dobby. I think they can handle clothing as long as it isn't handed directly to them, or left as a gift. A lot of magic is about intentions. Anyway... didn't the elves in the stories get upset if they were insulted or mistreated, and leave?"

"I think so. But that's stories, not the real thing."

"Yes, but a lot of Muggle stories of magic are pretty close to the truth. Anyway, maybe we should find some, and figure out what insults them, get to know them. As well intentioned as you are, speaking for someone you've never spoken with before is a good way to accidentally insult them. Also, it's always best to give the oppressed an opportunity to speak for themselves."

"That all makes sense, Al. But how do we speak with them? They're very good at remaining unseen."

"Well I'd start by finding out where the kitchens are. There's a lot of them working down there, right? Ron filled me in earlier."

Hermione smiled. He guessed she was glad to have someone on her side of this business.

"So does this mean you'll join S- er, H.E.L.F.?"

"Sure, why not? I like house elves. I want to get to know more about them."

"Oooh, thank you Al! I'll get you a badge once I've fixed them."

"About that, I've had another thought. Maybe S.P.C.H.E. would be a better name. You know, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to House Elves?"

She considered that, the feather end of a quill being worried along her lips as she thought.

"Hmm... I'll consider both names before I make a decision. They're both very good names."

"Cool," he said. Then he sensed something and turned to look at the source of the sensation. "Ah. Well I'll leave you to that, Hermione. Javier has found me."

"Mmm hmm," she said absently as he sauntered over to his boyfriend.

 _'Howdy,'_ Al hissed in Parseltongue at Javier, who stared blankly back at him.

"You know I don't understand that language, Al," Javier said. "I wish I could, but I can't."

"I was just saying hi," Al said. "Let's take a walk."

The walk they went on took them to an unused classroom, where they sat down on the teacher's desk together and held hands, talking.

"So I have an idea. It involves you borrowing my invisibility cloak and either sneaking into my dorm later, where I have a private room, or sneaking back to your own dorm later. Or both."

"Oh my," Javier said, turning red. "Inviting me to your room already?"

"Yes. Just for snogging, of course. For now, that is. If you want to."

"I very much want to. I just don't know if I should. What if we get caught?"

"That is a valid concern. Maybe you should just spend the night at my place. If you don't want to sleep in my bed, I could make you a sleeping bag. And if I snore, you could sleep in my trunk to escape the noise. I wouldn't lock it, and anyway there's a handle for getting out if you accidentally get locked in."

"You're very forward," Javier said.

"Am I going too fast? We could just, you know... well, my main concern was not getting caught by Peeves, a teacher, or a prefect."

"I didn't say I _minded_ you being forward. Sure, I don't know what I want to do, but I don't mind you asking. And, well... there's the possibility of getting caught by other Griffindors. A snake amongst the lions and all. Also, you know, even if we were both Griffindors, me going into your private room for the night could be misinterpreted."

"You raise an excellent point. And as to sleeping, you know, in the same bed... apart from the other concerns, with my luck I'd wake up having turned into Addy or Iliana during the night. Which would be awkward for everyone involved. Or worse, wake up as Zoey.

"Still," he continued, "better a snake among the lions than a lion in the snake pit. Especially with Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle down there."

"True." Javier sighed, thinking. Then he turned to look Al right in the eyes, a first for him.

"I want to take the risk," he said.

"What excuse are you going to give your dorm-mates?"

"None. I doubt they'll notice me. If they do, it'll be a surprise."

Al nodded. "Okay, stay here, I'll go get my cloak."

Javier nodded, and Al took off, walking as fast as he dared, almost a run, to the Griffindor common room, up to his room, and back down with the cloak in his pocket. A short time later, he was back in the spare classroom, and putting the cloak over Javier.

"Follow me, okay?"

"Okay."

They walked, more sedately this time, back to the portrait of the Fat Lady.

"You again so soon? In or out, boy, make up your mind."

"Balderdash," he said, and she opened with a sigh.

He held the door open without making it obvious that he was doing so, so Javier could get in behind him and still allow him to close the painting, in case anyone inside was watching. He could still sense Javier behind him, invisible. It occurred to him, then, that this empathic power was more useful than he'd realized, if it gave him the ability to sense invisible people.

Carefully they made their way up the stairs together and up into his room. Once they were both in, he closed the door, and sound-proofed it with a spell.

He turned around. Javier had taken the cloak off and draped it over a chair. The younger boy was suddenly looking nervous and unsure.

"Er... I guess we sit on the bed together?"

"We don't have to. This chair here will hold us both if you sit on my lap."

"Oh it will? Good."

Al sat down on the reclining chair in the corner and patted his lap. Javier turned red and giggled, sitting carefully down on Al's lap, his feet hanging over the side of the chair. He leaned up against Al's chest, his head missing hitting Al's chin by a centimeter.

The two boys sat there like that, chuckling at the situation for a few minutes before settling down some. Al ran his fingers through Javier's hair, occasionally stopping to gently caress his ear. As the minutes passed, his boyfriend's ear became more and more interesting, until he gently lifted Javier up to look at his other ear, Javier's face full of amused confusion. The fact that Al was caressing his other ear didn't help clarify anything for him.

However, the kiss on the earlobe certainly _did._ His face turned bright red at the gentle act of affection, and grew even redder as Al made more kisses to the ear, slowly working his way up and down the ear. But it was a pleasant feeling, and his eyes began to close as he focused on enjoying it.

It was a _very_ pleasant surprise when Al took the bottom of his earlobe in his mouth, sucking on it. He was certain you could cook an egg on his face at this point. He hadn't been sure what to expect with this whole 'snogging' thing, but he hadn't expected this. It was better than he'd imagined it.

While sucking on Javier's ear, Al was holding hands with him, Al's thumb stroking the soft skin under it. Javier responded by clenching his hand briefly and making a small moan of pleasure.

To his slight annoyance, Al left his ear and began kissing his jawline. But it was plain Al was going in the direction of his mouth, so he didn't complain. This would be his first kiss, and he was looking forward to it, even if his face looked like it had been badly sunburned.

But, as though to spite him, he suddenly remembered the others in Al's collective, and realized they were probably feeling the same things Al was. It shook him out of his reverie and made him jerk his head back.

"Did I do something wrong?"

"No. I just... I had an upsetting thought."

"Nobody's going to get in. I have the door warded."

"That's not what I mean. Er... are we... I don't know how to word this..."

Al waited.

"Um... are we alone?"

"Well, yeah."

"No, I mean... are the others, um..."

"Ah. Would it bother you if they were... well... 'eavesdropping,' for lack of a better word?"

"A little, yeah."

"Well there's a place they can go to get away. They'll get a memory update later, but it won't be the same as being there live, trust me on that. I can make them clear off if they haven't already."

"Er... you don't know?"

"It can be hard to know without looking closer."

"Well, okay."

 _ **Okay you lot, anyone here spying on us? Hello?**_

Al poked around inside for the others. It was a bit like fumbling in a dark room for people hiding in the darkness, but different. Still, if they were there, he'd soon know. He felt around in every corner of their shared space. All he found was a message left behind. 'We cleared off as soon as you decided to have him sit on your lap,' the message said. So they were down in the Basement, then; good.

"They've been gone since before we sat down. Hiding out in the Basement until it's safe to come out. You'll be my first kiss, and mine alone. The others will have to get theirs later."

"The Basement?" Javier asked, curious.

"That's what we call it. One or more of us goes down there, and they basically disappear. It's like we shut off for a time, or something. Anyway, that's where they are. They'll turn up later."

"How will they know when they can come back?"

Al shrugged. "No idea. They just know, somehow."

"Ah, okay. Well, er... continue, I guess."

"Goody," Al said, and started kissing Javier's jaw again.

To his mixed feelings, Al went back to his ear, kissing and sucking on it again. He had to admit, it worked well to get him into the mood. He supposed just mashing lips without preamble might be boring. Not that he'd know from experience. But enough of those thoughts; he pushed them aside and focused on the bliss at hand.

After a time, the kisses went back along his jaw and meandered toward his mouth. Al was doing a good job of building up tension; delicious, delicious tension. He was excited for it to happen at last. The tension kept building. Al kissed the corners of his mouth, and around the outside of his lips. Javier was practically about to weep from the tension. He suppressed the urge to shout 'Kiss me already, damn you!' But it wasn't easy.

Then, finally, blissfully, their lips properly locked together. He felt Al's tongue on his lips, prompting him to open them. He did, and Al's tongue slid in, and he tasted the other boy.

At this point, Javier's entire body was as hot as his face had been earlier, and he was shaking a little. He was more excited than he'd ever been before. He knew he would remember this for years to come.

Javier had slept in a sleeping bag on the floor that night. He wasn't ready to share a bed with Al, even if they were both doing nothing more than sleeping. Not that much would have happened; the kiss alone had made Javier so warm all over that he thought anything more than kissing would make him spontaneously combust. In fact, it had been Al's hand moving a little too close to his hip that had ended their kissing, by getting Javier so excited that he'd passed out. Al had needed to wake him up with a spell. They'd spent the rest of the night before bed just cuddling in the chair.

It turned out that getting back to the Slytherin common room was easier if you left Griffindor around dawn. He'd woken Al to tell him he was going; Al had sleepily acknowledged him, and told him he could return the cloak later, before rolling over and going back to sleep. But Javier had left the cloak in Al's room. His Disillusionment Charm wasn't anything to write home about, but it got him out of Griffindor and away from the sleeping Fat Lady. He was perfectly within his rights to be up and wandering around at dawn, after all.

He'd been very tempted to write someone about the experience, but he didn't want his parents to know he'd spent the night with his boyfriend in the boy's private bedroom, and he didn't have any other friends to tell, yet. So he just wandered around, eventually going out onto the grounds for a walk. He didn't have his cloak, but it was just warm enough that his robes were sufficient.

It had been a surprise to him when he found someone else out there. It had been more of a surprise that he'd recognized her. She was standing at the lakeside, tossing bits of bread in the water for the ducks. Her blond-ish hair was messy, like she hadn't bothered to comb it when she woke up.

"Luna Lovegood?" he said, unsure he had the name right.

"Yes, that's me," Luna said dreamily, turning her protuberant eyes on him. "You're Al's boyfriend." It was a statement, not a question.

"Er, yeah. My name's Javier Mendoza."

"Ah yes, I remember now."

He stood there. It occurred to him that this girl was weird enough in her own right that she probably wouldn't mind his own weirdness. He could have another friend, someone other than Al.

"Er..." He struggled to speak. But you couldn't just _ask_ someone to be friends, could you?

Almost as though she'd read his mind, she said, "Don't worry. If you want to say something, say it. Plainly. You don't have to avoid saying the first thing you think, even if most people do. I won't be offended."

"Okay. Um... wanna be friends?"

"Oooh, yes! I love having friends. I don't have many. Iliana is a friend of mine. Some of the others in her collective, too. I don't think I've met everyone."

"What about Ron and Hermione?" he asked, though he thought he knew what she'd say.

"They're nice enough. But I don't know them well enough to know whether or not we're friends. I'd like us to be, but I don't know."

"You could ask them."

"Yes, I suppose I could. Maybe I will. Want to help me feed the ducks?"

"Oh yes, I would."

She handed him a few slices of bread.

"Where'd you get this? Breakfast hasn't started yet."

"I asked the house elves for some. They're happy to give it to me when I ask."

"Did you know that ducks really shouldn't eat bread? It's junk food for them. Their version of deep fat fried food, maybe worse."

"Oh. In that case, I'll have to look up what they eat and see if I can find some."

That took Javier by surprise. The usual reaction to him correcting people was annoyance, or worse. He smiled; if this was what Luna was like, he thought he'd really enjoy her company.

They stood there in silence for a time, just feeding the ducks. Finally, she spoke again.

"What does the Griffindor common room look like? I've never been there before."

"Wh-what? How did you know?"

"Oh, it wasn't hard. I saw you coming down from Griffindor tower earlier. And that was when I remembered Al and the others have a room all to themselves."

"We didn't... we just snogged. And I slept on the floor, in a sleeping bag."

She shrugged. "That's none of my business."

"Oh. I just thought... well..."

"I'm not concerned with what others do, as long as they're not hurting anyone."

"Good to know. Likewise."

"So what _does_ the Griffindor common room look like?"

He thought for a few moments, then started to describe it as best he could from his quick journeys through it on his way in and then out. He didn't think it was a great description, but she smiled and seemed satisfied anyway.

"Well," she said, clapping crumbs off her hands. "I'm going to go to the library before breakfast. What about you?"

"Is it open?"

"Yes."

"In that case, I'll come with you."

"Is Al coming, too?"

He shook his head. "He's asleep still."

She nodded, and they made their way to the library.

The next two days passed without incident. Neville _almost_ melted the cauldron he and Al were using, as he was partnering Neville to help him out, but he avoided catastrophe and set Neville to preparing ingredients and listening to him when he gave pointers and so on, relayed from Iliana. Snape looked like he was angry enough to spit nails, and kept giving the two of them enraged glances, but as they weren't doing anything wrong, that was all he could do. Even if he _was_ still angry about missing out on the DADA job again.

Al – who was frankly astonished to have remained himself for so long – had noticed, though, that Snape was scared of Moody for some reason, and was avoiding the ex-auror. He somewhat understood this, though; Moody was one of only three people now who Al couldn't read with his empathic powers. He'd figured out Snape by direct observation, though; it was damn near impossible to hide the little body-language tells that people gave away without meaning to. Al made a note to do the same to Moody, if he could.

When the class finally came up, they were all so excited that only Hermione was almost late, having been doing her house elf stuff in the library again.

They hurried into three chairs right in front of the teacher's desk, took out their copies of _The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection,_ and waited, unusually quiet. Soon they heard Moody's distinctive clunking footsteps coming down the corridor, and he entered the room, looking as strange and frightening as ever. They could just see his clawed, wooden foot protruding from underneath his robes.

"You can put those away," he growled, stumping over to his desk and sitting down, "those books. You won't need them."

Excited, they hastily obeyed.

Moody gave a speech of sorts. He mentioned Lupin's notes on their progress with Dark creatures, saying they were very behind in curses, and made a lot of excellent points about that; that fighting for your life wasn't like a duel. In a real life or death fight, the only rule was 'survive.' You had to do anything you could think of to survive.

Where it began to get worrying, though, was when he started talking about the Unforgivable Curses, curses that were highly illegal.

"So … do any of you know which curses are most heavily punished by wizarding law?"

Several hands rose tentatively into the air, including Ron's and Hermione's. Moody pointed at Ron, though his magical eye was fixed elsewhere.

"Er," said Ron tentatively, "my dad told me about one. … Is it called the Imperius Curse, or something?"

"Ah, yes," said Moody appreciatively. "Your father _would_ know that one. Gave the Ministry a lot of trouble at one time, the Imperius Curse."

Moody got heavily to his mismatched feet, opened his desk drawer, and took out a glass jar. Three large black spiders were scuttling around inside it. Al felt Ron recoil slightly next to him — Ron hated spiders.

 _Surely he's not going to... demonstrate them?_ Adira said in his head.

 _ **#Yeah, that would be madness! Performing an illegal curse in front of kids, even if it is on a spider.#**_

 _ **I dunno, Iliana, he's said to be mad.**_

Moody reached into the jar, caught one of the spiders, and held it in the palm of his hand so that they could all see it. He then pointed his wand at it and muttered, " _Imperio_!"

As the spider danced and more for the delight of the class, Al just stared, dumbstruck. Moody _was_ mad!

Everyone was laughing, except for him and Moody.

"Think it's funny, do you?" he growled. "You'd like it, would you, if I did it to you?"

The laughter died away almost instantly.

"Total control," said Moody quietly as the spider balled itself up and began to roll over and over. "I could make it jump out of the window, drown itself, throw itself down one of your throats …"

Ron gave an involuntary shudder.

"Years back, there were a lot of witches and wizards being controlled by the Imperius Curse," said Moody, and Al knew he was talking about the days in which Voldemort had been all-powerful. "Some job for the Ministry, trying to sort out who was being forced to act, and who was acting of their own free will.

"The Imperius Curse can be fought, and I'll be teaching you how, but it takes real strength of character, and not everyone's got it. Better avoid being hit with it if you can. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" he barked, and everyone jumped.

 _ **#Teaching us to resist the Imperius curse? I wonder what that involves?#**_

They went through the same thing again, with the Cruciatus Curse. Moody turned his wand on the spider, said the incantation, and it curled up in agony. If it could have screamed, Al was sure it would be.

"Stop it!" Hermione said shrilly.

Al looked around at her. She was looking, not at the spider, but at Neville, and Al, following her gaze, saw that Neville's hands were clenched upon the desk in front of him, his knuckles white, his eyes wide and horrified.

 _What the...?_ Adira wondered.

Al felt fury rise up in him on Neville's behalf. He didn't know why Neville reacted so strongly to this curse, but clearly it was triggering the poor boy.

Moody stopped, shrunk the spider back to normal size, then asked for another Curse. Hermione was the one who supplied the name: Avada Kedavra, the killing curse.

Moody put his hand into the glass jar, and almost as though it knew what was coming, the third spider scuttled frantically around the bottom of the jar, trying to evade Moody's fingers, but he trapped it, and placed it upon the desktop. It started to scuttle frantically across the wooden surface.

Moody raised his wand, and Al felt a sudden thrill of foreboding.

" _Avada Kedavra_!" Moody roared.

There was a flash of blinding green light and a rushing sound, as though a vast, invisible something was soaring through the air — instantaneously the spider rolled over onto its back, unmarked, but unmistakably dead. Several of the students stifled cries; Ron had thrown himself backward and almost toppled off his seat as the spider skidded toward him.

Moody swept the dead spider off the desk onto the floor.

"Not nice," he said calmly. "Not pleasant. And there's no countercurse. There's no blocking it. Only one known person has ever survived it, and he's sitting right in front of me."

 **Us, obviously.**

Al and the others stared at the dead spider, their thoughts focused on wondering if that was how their parents had died. Until, from what felt like a long way away, Moody spoke again.

" _Avada Kedavra's_ a curse that needs a powerful bit of magic behind it — you could all get your wands out now and point them at me and say the words, and I doubt I'd get so much as a nosebleed. But that doesn't matter. I'm not here to teach you how to do it.

"Now, if there's no countercurse, why am I showing you? _Because you've got to know._ You've got to appreciate what the worst is. You don't want to find yourself in a situation where you're facing it. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" he roared, and the whole class jumped again.

"Now … those three curses — _Avada Kedavra,_ Imperius, and Cruciatus — are known as the Unforgivable Curses. The use of any one of them on a fellow human being is enough to earn a life sentence in Azkaban. That's what you're up against. That's what I've got to teach you to fight. You need preparing. You need arming. But most of all, you need to practice _constant, never-ceasing vigilance_. Get out your quills … copy this down."

They did. They spent the rest of the class dutifully taking notes as Moody lectured. No one spoke until the bell rang — but when Moody had dismissed them and they had left the classroom, a torrent of talk burst forth. Most people were discussing the curses in awed voices — "Did you see it twitch?" "— and when he killed it — just like that!"

They were talking about the lesson, Al and Adira thought, as though it had been some sort of spectacular show, but they hadn't found it very entertaining — and nor, it seemed, had Hermione.

"Hurry up," she said tensely to Al and Ron.

"Not the ruddy library again?" said Ron.

"No," said Hermione curtly, pointing up a side passage. "Neville."

Neville was standing alone, halfway up the passage, staring at the stone wall opposite him with the same horrified, wide-eyed look he had worn when Moody had demonstrated the Cruciatus Curse.

Al watched curiously as Hermione tried to comfort Neville, who was clearly in an emotional shock; he didn't need his empathic sense to know that. The demonstration had left Neville in quite a state.

An odd clunking noise sounded behind them, and they turned to see Professor Moody limping toward them. All four of them fell silent, watching him apprehensively, but when he spoke, it was in a much lower and gentler growl than they had yet heard.

"It's all right, sonny," he said to Neville. "Why don't you come up to my office? Come on … we can have a cup of tea. …"

Neville looked even more frightened at the prospect of tea with Moody. He neither moved nor spoke. Moody turned his magical eye upon Al.

"You all right, are you, Potter?"

Al glared at him. "Yes," he said calmly, with a touch of ice in his voice.

Moody's blue eye quivered slightly in its socket as it surveyed Al. Then he said, "You've got to know. It seems harsh, maybe, _but you've got to know._ No point pretending … well … come on, Longbottom, I've got some books that might interest you."

Neville looked pleadingly at Al, Ron, and Hermione, but they didn't say anything, so Neville had no choice but to allow himself to be steered away, one of Moody's gnarled hands on his shoulder.

"What was that about?" said Ron, watching Neville and Moody turn the corner.

"I don't know," said Hermione, looking pensive.

"Some lesson though, huh Al?" Ron said. But the look Al gave him made Ron go pale and turn away in a hurry.

After dinner, Al followed Ron to the dorm Ron shared with Neville and the others, his mind too preoccupied to notice he was in the wrong place.

He looked up to see Neville there alone, sitting on his bed, reading. He looked a good deal calmer than at the end of Moody's lesson, though still not entirely normal. His eyes were rather red.

"You all right, Neville?" Al asked him.

"Oh yes," said Neville, "I'm fine, thanks. Just reading this book Professor Moody lent me. …"

He held up the book: _Magical Water Plants of the Mediterranean._

"Apparently, Professor Sprout told Professor Moody I'm really good at Herbology," Neville said. There was a faint note of pride in his voice that Al had rarely heard there before. "He thought I'd like this."

Telling Neville what Professor Sprout had said, Al thought, had been a very tactful way of cheering Neville up, for Neville very rarely heard that he was good at anything. It was the sort of thing Professor Lupin would have done.

The book also sounded interesting. He made a mental note to borrow it from Neville, later, when he was feeling better. Wait at least a week before asking him, he decided.

He sat down with Ron to do their Divination homework together, but Al couldn't focus. He was too lost in thought. Too late, he realized that such unfocused thinking, trying to split his attention, might-

Sure enough, they transformed, and Iliana took Al's place. Al shrugged mentally, and went back to getting lost in thought, while Iliana and Ron thought up made-up predictions, since they couldn't figure out how to do it for real.

After a time, his attention changed focus. Iliana was still focused on homework with Ron, but Al was free to peek through the peripheral vision at Fred and George, who were being secretive about some kind of document. It was unlike them, within the castle, since Lee Jordan wasn't with them. The twins, working on something secret together without Lee? It was weird.

As Al watched, George shook his head at Fred, scratched out something with his quill, and said, in a very quiet voice that nevertheless carried across the almost deserted room, "No — that sounds like we're accusing him. Got to be careful …"

By this point, Iliana had noticed, too, and was looking at them. They cut off. She smiled at them, not wanting them to think she was spying, but they got up and left anyway.

Fred and George had been gone ten minutes or so when the portrait hole opened and Hermione climbed into the common room carrying a sheaf of parchment in one hand and a box whose contents rattled as she walked in the other. Crookshanks arched his back, purring.

"Hi there, Iliana," she said, "I've just finished!"

Al waited as Iliana, Ron, and Hermione had a talk about the fake predictions. The way she'd come in, and said she was finished, made him think she had come in with a specific purpose in mind. He thought he knew what that purpose was, and waited.

Sure enough, when Hermione finally found an opening in the conversation, she revealed to them that she'd finished the H.E.L.F. badges. Al was annoyed to find out that Iliana was less than enthusiastic about the group. But she played along for Al's sake, taking a badge.

He _was_ glad, though, that Hermione was taking his earlier words to heart. One of the first things on her to-do list was to find a way into the kitchens to talk with the elves. The other was to try to find a way to get more members.

Al was also dismayed at Ron's perspective on the issue. Iliana was going to let it slide, but when Al began threatening to take a page out of Zoey's book and start singing the Hogwarts school song until they all went mad, she relented and told Ron off.

"Ron, your family doesn't have any house elves," Iliana said. "How would you know if they like it or not? The only house elf you've ever met is Dobby."

There, that got through to him. Ron went silent, a little pouty, but clearly he knew they had a point. The rest of the conversation went a lot more smoothly after that. Al checked out of the conversation entirely, his wandering thoughts sinking him down, down, down into the Basement.

One of their favorite classes now was History of Magic. Taught by Professor Lupin, the class was much more interesting. Nobody fell asleep in class now. Just as with DADA, Professor Lupin mixed lecture with practical aspects of the class. Their first class, Lupin had brought a goblin to class. The small being told them about the goblin rebellions from the goblin point of view, and captured everyone's attention with reenactments of some of the battle moves and war cries of the goblins. But he also told them what the goblins had rebelled for, and that they were still not happy with how things had turned out. They wanted wand magic, as well as their usual magic, to expand their powers. But it was illegal for anyone but a human (or someone who was at least part human) to have a wand. It made Al think, made him wonder if he could go into wand-making.

Their next class was more sedate by comparison. To test them on how well they'd done the assigned reading, as well as to teach, Lupin mixed lecture with asking questions of random students, or having them finish his sentences. He ignored raised hands (like Hermione's or Iliana's) unless three people in a row had missed the question.

A few classes later he changed things again for one period, going for a class debate style instead, about goblin rights and whether or not they should be expanded. When it got a bit too heated, Lupin calmed the class down by having them all rest quietly for ten minutes before giving them their new assignments for next time.

And so it went for two weeks, their two very interesting classes making up for the badness of some of the other classes. Iliana was annoyed that Quidditch was canceled for the year, but it did give them more time to do homework.

To their surprise, Professor Moody had announced that he would be putting the Imperius Curse on each of them in turn, to demonstrate its power and to see whether they could resist its effects.

"But — but you said it's illegal, Professor," said Hermione uncertainly as Moody cleared away the desks with a sweep of his wand, leaving a large clear space in the middle of the room. "You said — to use it against another human was —"

"Dumbledore wants you taught what it feels like," said Moody, his magical eye swiveling onto Hermione and fixing her with an eerie, unblinking stare. "If you'd rather learn the hard way — when someone's putting it on you so they can control you completely — fine by me. You're excused. Off you go."

Nobody in the Potter collective knew what to think of that. On the one hand, it was illegal. On the other hand, Dumbledore trusted Moody. Was it _always_ illegal? After all, some potions were illegal for anyone but the ministry to use, but there were times when Snape still taught how to make those potions – mostly in N.E.W.T. level. So they decided to roll with it for now.

Whether these thoughts occurred to Hermione or not, she nonetheless stood down, and Moody began to line them up one at a time to see if they could resist the Imperius curse. Iliana and the others watched as, one by one, their classmates did the most extraordinary things under its influence. Dean Thomas hopped three times around the room, singing the national anthem. Lavender Brown imitated a squirrel. Neville performed a series of quite astonishing gymnastics he would certainly not have been capable of in his normal state. Not one of them seemed to be able to fight off the curse, and each of them recovered only when Moody had removed it.

"Potter," Moody growled, "you next."

Iliana moved forward into the middle of the classroom, into the space that Moody had cleared of desks. Moody raised his wand, pointed it at Iliana, and said, " _Imperio_!"

For a brief moment there was a wonderful feeling of floating, as their worries were wiped away, before the feeling broke and they blinked at the world around them.

"Hmm... interesting. Maybe it's those extra minds inside of you, girl, but for whatever reason, that spell wasn't strong enough. I'm gonna try it again. _Imperio_!"

The floating feeling persisted for longer, long enough that they heard a new voice in their head that said 'Jump onto the desk.'

She bent her legs to obey, but then she collapsed on the ground in pain, clutching her head. She was glowing, and shrinking. They were Zoey now.

"Fascinating," Moody growled. "You're a hard lot to reign in, I see. This is good news. One more time, shall we? _Imperio!_ "

'Jump onto the desk. Jump onto the desk.'

 _ **I don't bloody think so!**_

When they woke up, they were Al again.

Moody tried a few more times. They shifted to Iliana again once more, but then stopped changing. But Moody had no better luck controlling them with the spell.

"Well, seems you're naturally resistant to the Imperius Curse. Excellent! They'll have a hard time controlling _you_! Still, not very instructive for the others."

The fourth years were beginning to note a huge uptick in the amount of assigned work they had to do, in every class. Even Lupin was giving them a lot more work than he had as DADA teacher.

"This is an important year," Lupin explained. "Your O.W.L.s are coming next year, and you are very behind in this class, thanks to Professor Binns. I have a lot to teach you before then. Just be glad you're not fifth years, yet; they're doing three times what you're doing in this class. Why, we spent twice as long on the Goblin rebellions in this class than they did, and they had more homework on it than you've had from me this year and the prior year _combined_."

Professor Trelawney was, of course, thrilled with the fake predictions Iliana and Ron had made together, but nobody was much thrilled when they were asked to do it again. Al was annoyed because here he was, a legitimate seer, being taught by a fraud who only had visions when the Powers That Be saw fit to give her one, and she didn't even know it!

Professor Snape was forcing them to research antidotes. They took this one seriously, as he had hinted that he might be poisoning one of them before Christmas to see if their antidote worked. Professor Flitwick had asked them to read three extra books in preparation for their lesson on Summoning Charms.

Alastair knocked on Professor McGonagall's office door.

"Come in," she said.

He did, and closed the door behind her. She looked up at him, surprised.

"Did you need something, Mr. Potter?"

"Yes. I was... well, for all that he was a horrible teacher, Lockhart had one good idea."

She raised an eyebrow. "He did?"

"Yes. The dueling club. Run by a competent teacher, it would be a great idea. God knows we could use something to compensate for our spotty Defense training, with a new teacher every year. I know Moody is great, but he's not teaching dueling so far, and as far as I know he doesn't have any plans. I'd suggest he teach the dueling club, but between the curse on the position and him saying he was only staying a year anyway... well, it would be best to learn dueling from someone we know is going to be around next year."

"And who did you have in mind for that, Mr. Potter?"

"There's you, or Flitwick, or even Dumbledore. Or you could all take it in turns."

"Me? Oh I don't know about that. I'm not as young as I was..."

"Perhaps, but you and Dumbledore both radiate this aura of well-controlled power. And Flitwick is rumored to be a dueling champion."

"I don't know. What about Professor Snape?"

"How about no," he said as a statement. "That didn't go so well the first time, and not many people like him. But we all do like you and Flitwick, and I think most people like Dumbledore. I know _I_ do."

"Well you are very good at flattery, Mr. Potter. I shall run the idea past Dumbledore, with my recommendation that we proceed with it."

Al blinked.

"You look surprised. All that careful flattery, and you didn't think you would succeed?"

"Uh, I did have my doubts. Since, you know, it didn't go so well last time. But I know there's a lot of students who are woeful at Defense spells, and with Moldywart-"

Professor McGonagall choked with frightened shock, but then actually _chuckled_.

"-er... yeah, with Moldywart still something like alive, it would be a good idea for everyone to be able to defend themselves, so I thought 'why not ask?'"

McGonagall smiled at him, looking barely able to control her mirth.

"Yes yes, you already made your point. Now, if you would please leave before I -" (snerk) "lose my composure."

"Yes, Professor," he said, grinning. He left the room.

After closing the door, he walked away loudly but then crept back, just in time to hear her laugh in quite an undignified manner.

On September 19th, Zoey came Out and ran off during dinner. As dinner was finishing, she showed up at Hermione's side.

"You done eatin'?"

"Yes. But I wanted to go to-"

"Good, you can come with me now. To Griffindor tower!"

"Why?"

"You'll see. But I think you know why."

"Oh, yes, it's my birthday. You got me something?"

"Yes indeedy. Come on!"

They went as fast as they dared back to Griffindor tower, and into the common room. As soon as they came in, they saw Ron, Ginny, Dean Thomas, Neville, and the Weasley Twins standing around a table with a birthday cake on it.

"Happy birthday!" they all said.

Hermione blushed. "Thank you, everyone, thank you. Oh Zoey, where'd you get the cake?"

"With some help from Fred and George," she replied. "Don't worry, it's carrot cake. Sugar free, with sugar-free icing."

Hermione gave the small girl a big hug. Then they all sat down and went about the normal birthday party things like the birthday song, blowing out the candles, and Hermione opening her presents, as well as a lot of pumpkin juice and a wide variety of snacks. And presents, of course.

The next day, there was an announcement hung on the notice boards, which announced that the Dueling Club was being reinstated starting tonight, and would be overseen by Professors Flitwick and McGonagall, with occasional visits by Dumbledore and Moody.

"Well let's hope it goes better this time around," Ron said.

"Yes, quite," agreed Hermione.

"I wonder why they've brought it back," Ron said.

"Er," said Adira. "I know why. Alastair asked for it."

Ron gaped at her. "He did? Why?"

"Because he's kinda getting paranoid, plus some students are pants at dueling."

Ron snorted, grinning. "Like Javier?"

"Among others," she said coolly.

"Why're you getting defensive? He's not _your_ boyfriend."

"Er... yeah. Sorry. Emotional spillover from Al."

"Forgiven. Hey, I wonder what Dueling Club is gonna be like, now. You joining up, Hermione?"

"Yes, I think so. It sounds fun, as long as I don't get stuck with Millicent Bulstrode again."

"I'll take her if I have to, Hermione," said Adira.

"Thanks, Addy."

Adira's left eye twitched. "Not a problem, Hermy."

"No," Hermione said, in a voice like arctic seawater. " _Don't_ call me Hermy again."

"Er... alright then," Adira said, backing up carefully.

"Good. Glad we've settled that."

Adira was surprised by how many people turned up for the reinstated Dueling Club, given how poorly it had gone last time. Everything was set up similarly, only the stage was plain wood, not golden. She noticed Flitwick and McGonagall up there, waiting for the top of the hour to arrive.

While they waited, Adira looked around at the other people. It was a good mix of people from all the Houses, which made sense, since there was no Quidditch this year.

She was just wondering how they'd get partnered, when Javier came up to her. He looked carefully at her face, then held out his hand.

"Adira Potter, I presume?"

"Yes, that's me," she said, shaking his hand.

"Javier Mendoza," he said.

"Yes, I know. Glad to, er... glad to meet you," she said, suddenly remembering him and Al kissing. She hadn't been there at the time, but still... the memory was vivid.

"Sorry about that," she said, "I was just taken off-guard a little."

"Understandable," he said. "Is... er... is Al, um, present?"

"Hmm... no, not at the moment. Should I call for him?"

"No no, that's okay. In fact, I'm glad it worked out this way. I don't know if I could focus as well with him around. But, er... you and he know the same kinds of magic, right?"

"Yes. Why?"

"I mean, I know you're not the one teaching, but if you could give me some hints, that would help me a lot."

She opened her mouth to speak, but McGonagall was calling for attention, so she closed it.

"Welcome, everyone, to the reinstated Dueling Club. Since someone pointed out it was Gilderoy Lockhart's only good idea, if run by a competent teacher, we decided to bring it back. Professor Flitwick and I expect you to behave yourselves in this club. There are to be no spells we do not approve ahead of time. No dark spells, no summoning snakes, no casting any spell we have not given express permission to use. Violate these rules, and you will be dismissed from the club immediately. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"

"Yes, Professor McGonagall!" everyone said in unison.

"Now the first spell we shall work on is the disarming charm, expeliarmus. You will get to see competent teachers cast this spell first. Professor Flitwick, if you would show them the charm?"

The two teachers got into position on the stage, bowed to one another, and got into a proper dueling stance. Then they counted down from three, and began. Professor Flitwick shouted, " _Expeliarmus!_ " and McGonagall's wand flew out of her hand. She hadn't even attempted to defend herself.

They switched places, and this time she disarmed the smaller professor.

"Now that you have seen it demonstrated, we shall pair you up and have you take turns practicing it on each other. And I repeat again, anyone using any spell other than expeliarmus will be banned from attending this club for the rest of the school year."

Adira stood awkwardly by Javier, since he wanted to partner her for this activity. It was weird looking at him, because seeing him brought to mind pale memories of Al's feelings for the boy, but Adira had no interest in him herself. It was a strange feeling. She readjusted her glasses to give her hands something to do while she waited.

To his credit, he barely looked at her, and their empathic sense told her that he had no feelings about her beyond what might be expected of two people who'd basically just met for the first time. But there were other emotions floating around the room that concerned her more; clearly their attitudes toward one another were confusing some other people, who – she guessed – still hadn't quite become convinced of her and Al being different people entirely.

As she pulled her just-past-the-shoulderblade length hair into a ponytail with a pink and green scrunchy, she felt someone's gaze on her, and turned to look. It was Millicent Bulstrode. She glared at Millicent.

"What are _you_ looking at?" she asked the bigger girl.

Millicent smirked, opening her mouth to answer.

"Never mind, I can feel the answer well enough," she said. Another one of _those_ people. This was going to be very annoying.

Professor Flitwick came around then.

"Ah yes, Potter and Mendoza, that will be acceptable. Ah, Miss Bulstrode, without a partner, I see? Well here, Mr. Finnigan doesn't have one either, you can partner him."

Adira smirked back at Millicent, then focused on Javier.

"Okay, do you want to go first, or should I?"

"Um... you first. I want to see it done again."

"Fine by me."

They got into position, bowed, and Adira shot the spell at him. " _Expelliarmus_!"

His wand soared through the air at her, and she caught it. She tossed it back at him, and he fumbled it and dropped it.

"Sorry about that, Javier. I won't do it again. I'll just hand it back next time."

"It's my fault," he said, picking it back up. "Don't worry about it."

When he tried the spell on her, she didn't feel anything.

"You should try it again, I felt nothing."

He nodded, and tried again. This time, she felt a tug, but not enough to pull her wand from her.

"Er, Professor Flitwick?" she asked, since he was nearby.

"Yes, Miss Potter?"

"What's he doing wrong? I barely felt anything, and I don't really know how to correct him, even though I managed the spell fine."

Professor Flitwick walked over to Javier and did his best – being short – to correct Javier's stance and wand movements, and gave him advice about how to put more power into the spell. Then he stood back to watch Javier try again.

When Javier tried again, her wand flew through the air, and its tip hit him square on the nose, leaving a red boil behind. Flitwick healed the boil quickly, and returned Adira's wand to her.

"Maybe practice a few more times, see if you can catch it this time," he suggested. "Call on Professor McGonagall or myself if you get hit with the wand again, okay?"

They nodded, and he walked off to help others.

When Javier next tried the spell, Adira's wand flew so far away that they had to enlist several peoples' help to locate it before they could continue. He tried again, and ended up fumbling her wand and dropping it _and_ his own wand. She put her face in one hand and groaned.

"S-sorry, Adira, I've just never been any good at catching stuff."

"That's alright. At least you're doing the spell. Er... maybe we should try it with us both moving, since rarely are you going to be facing a stationary opponent," she suggested.

"Er, alright then."

They moved around this time now, like a real duel. He tried the spell several times, and she ducked each time. He finally got her the fourth time around, but was so surprised that he was too slow looking up to track her wand, and it poked him in the eye.

 _ **Oh wow,**_ Al said to her, back from wherever he'd been, as Professor McGonagall helped a tearful Javier to the hospital wing. _**He's worse than Neville at this.**_

She picked up her wand and turned to where she'd spotted Neville. He and Ernie McMillan were busy looking for Neville's wand.

 _Yeah, you're right_. _He's gonna need a_ lot _of help._


	25. The Triwizard Tournament

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 25"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-five:** **The Triwizard Tournament**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__ _and_ _ _{Tier}__ _if I ever get around to it_ _ _.__

 _ **Note 4:**_ _I just ran across something that boggles my freaking mind, in a bad way. There was this guy on a YouTube video, not a bad guy, but the most ignorant cis white person I have ever bloody seen in my life. While trying to say he thought such-and-such character might be genderqueer or transgender, he instead said they were "bisexual," conflating sexuality and gender in the most ridiculous way possible. It was so cringe-worthy I had to stop watching the video two minutes in to try to educate him on the proper terminology. He also seemed to think gay men were transgender, and I had to educate him on that. It's 2017, and this man is like, at least in his early 30's and I actually had to explain to him that sexuality and gender identity are not even remotely close to being the same thing, and that he wasn't using_ _ _any__ _of the terms correctly._

 _So yeah, please everyone, tell me you're not that bloody ignorant. Please tell me that you know that "bisexual" means "attracted to two or more genders sexually and/or romantically," and that you know it has nothing to do with a person's gender identity. Because honestly, running into just_ _ _one__ _of these people is making me want to bang my head against a brick wall repeatedly, or scream, or cry or something. I mean, I've heard stories about people that ignorant, but I always assumed it was an urban legend. Like, Google exists for a reason and literally takes 30 seconds at the most to use._

 _ **Note 5:**_ _A guest pointed out an error on chapter 9, saying the collective already knew where Dumbledore's office was. Being too lazy to fix such an old mistake, I'm just gonna handwave it away with the following: "Momentary forgetfulness on Al's part." Same with the mistake about the glasses in chapter 20._

 _Yes, occasionally there are mistakes. When you've read as much HP fanfic as I have, and have a less than great memory, and disorganized notes, that will happen. In fact, it's only my great memory for my own stories that saves me from having made more mistakes than I have, little details here and there notwithstanding. But don't let this discourage you from pointing out mistakes, by all means. It is helpful when the mistakes are big enough to foul things up. And I'll have a better idea, as the author of this fanfic, which mistakes are that bad._

 _All hail J.K. Rowling, owner of most of these characters!_

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

When they arrived in the entrance hall the Monday before Halloween, they found themselves unable to proceed owing to the large crowd of students congregated there, all milling around a large sign that had been erected at the foot of the marble staircase. Ron, the tallest of the three, stood on tiptoe to see over the heads in front of them and read the sign aloud to the other two:

 **TRIWIZARD TOURNAMENT**

 _The delegations from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang will be arriving at 6 o'clock on Friday the 30th of October. Lessons will end half an hour early —_

"Good," Adira said, remembering that Snape was doing antidotes with them. "Snape won't have time to poison all of us!"

 _Students will return their bags and books to their dormitories and assemble in front of the castle to greet our guests before the Welcoming Feast._

"Only a week away!" said Ernie Macmillan of Hufflepuff, emerging from the crowd, his eyes gleaming. "I wonder if Cedric knows? Think I'll go and tell him. …"

"Cedric?" said Ron blankly as Ernie hurried off.

"Diggory," said Adira. "He must be entering the tournament."

"That idiot, Hogwarts champion?" said Ron as they pushed their way through the chattering crowd toward the staircase.

Adira was blushing. She and Hermione said in stereo, "He's not an idiot!"

"Yeah," Adira said.

"You just don't like him because he beat Griffindor at Quidditch!" Hermione said. "I've heard he's a really good student — _and_ he's a prefect."

She spoke as though this settled the matter.

"And you two only like him because he's _handsome_." Ron said scathingly.

Adira blushed even more.

"Excuse me, I don't like people just because they're handsome!" said Hermione indignantly.

Ron gave a loud false cough, which sounded oddly like " _Lockhart_!"

"And what about me, eh?" Adira said, something in her tone dangerous.

"Er..."

"If you'll remember, I didn't like Lockhart at all."

"But... well, Hermione did. I mean..."

"Wait... are you jealous?" Adira asked him in a whisper. "But," she said, trying to read him better with her empathic sense, "not for my sake..."

Ron looked panicked, as Adira looked between him and Hermione.

 _ **Oh ye gods,**_ Al said in the privacy of their shared mind, _**Ron and Hermione? Eww. Like Hermione would ever stoop so low. I like Ron as a friend, but thinking about Hermione and Ron snogging is like thinking of my sister and a gorilla snogging. Pardon me while I go away to try to rid my mind of that image.**_

"Never mind," Adira said aloud. "Don't know what I was thinking."

Ever since the sign was put up, things had been going crazy. Rumors flew, which they mostly ignored, since Al wasn't the only one in the collective who wanted nothing to do with this tournament. The castle was getting cleaned to within an inch of its life, and teachers like McGonagall were getting snippy about the presentation of the school and its students. This was, after all, a huge competition among three of the major European schools of magic.

After Neville accidentally switched his ears onto a cactus, and got chewed out about it by McGonagall, Adira started tutoring him on the spell when she could. Neville wasn't the only one to suffer McGonagall's ire, either. Javier had done so poorly with the shield spell in Dueling Club that he'd actually somehow managed to knock Adira and Ernie hard enough into each other that they'd had to go to the hospital wing to make sure they hadn't been concussed. She heard later from Ron and Hermione that she'd given him quite the chewing-out.

Ron kept trying to bring up getting into the Tournament. Adira repeated Al's line about not wanting anything to do with it. They just wanted to watch and let others do the cool and dangerous stuff for once. But Adira wasn't as convincing as Al was, because a part of her kind of _did_ want to enter, and finally be famous for something she'd earned for once. But not if it meant breaking the rules laid down by Dumbledore.

At breakfast on the thirtieth of October, she, Ron, and Hermione went into the Great Hall, where Fred and George were working on something. Adira paid little attention to the resulting conversation between them and Ron. She was about to start eating when Javier came over to their table.

"Adira?" he said.

"Er, yeah. Hi Javier."

 _ **SHIT! I haven't written him or spoken with him or anything in over a week!**_

"Did you want to talk with Al?" she asked. "He, er... he just realized you two haven't communicated in over a week."

"Ah, good. Yes. I mean, I know you've got it hard, so many people sharing one body, but yeah... even when he _was_ communicating, it wasn't much. Busy with schoolwork, I know how it goes."

"Just a moment. Zoey?"

Zoey nodded their head, and soon enough switched their body over to Al's.

"Javier!" Al said, standing up and hugging his boyfriend.

"Ah, is this Al's boyfriend, which we've heard so many rumors about?" George asked Ron.

"Yeah, that's him."

Fred shook his head. "A lion dating a snake. But you lot are weird anyway, so we'll forgive it."

"Sit down, Javier," Al said. "Spare me the banal banter of these buffoons."

George threw a sausage at Al. Al caught it mid-air, astonishing even himself, and ate it.

"You two got any ideas on the Triwizard Tournament yet?" Ron asked. "Thought any more about trying to enter?"

"I asked McGonagall how the champions are chosen but she wasn't telling," said George bitterly. "She just told me to shut up and get on with transfiguring my raccoon."

"Wonder what the tasks are going to be?" said Ron thoughtfully. "You know, I bet we could do them, Al. We've done dangerous stuff before. …"

"Not in front of a panel of judges, you haven't," said Fred. "McGonagall says the champions get awarded points according to how well they've done the tasks."

"Who are the judges?" Ron asked.

"Well, the Heads of the participating schools are always on the panel," said Hermione, and everyone looked around at her, rather surprised, "because all three of them were injured during the Tournament of 1792, when a cockatrice the champions were supposed to be catching went on the rampage."

She noticed them all looking at her and said, with her usual air of impatience that nobody else had read all the books she had, "It's all in _Hogwarts, A History._ "

Al turned to Ron. "How many times do I have to tell you? I would rather eat live skrewts than be a part of that stupid tournament. I want to be a spectator for once."

Ron shrugged. "If you say so."

Al gave Javier a long-suffering look. Javier smiled sympathetically. They began focusing on their food.

"You want to stand by me later when the people from these other schools arrive? I hear we're going to be outside waiting for them."

"Sure, sounds fun."

There was a pleasant feeling of anticipation in the air that day. Nobody was very attentive in lessons, being much more interested in the arrival that evening of the people from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang; even Potions was more bearable than usual, as it was half an hour shorter. When the bell rang early, Al, Ron, and Hermione hurried up to Gryffindor Tower, deposited their bags and books as they had been instructed, pulled on their cloaks, and rushed back downstairs into the entrance hall.

The Heads of Houses were ordering their students into lines.

"Weasley, straighten your hat," Professor McGonagall snapped at Ron. "Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out of your hair."

Parvati scowled and removed a large ornamental butterfly from the end of her plait.

"Follow me, please," said Professor McGonagall. "First years in front … no pushing. …"

They filed down the steps and lined up in front of the castle. It was a cold, clear evening; dusk was falling and a pale, transparent-looking moon was already shining over the Forbidden Forest. Al, standing between Ron and Hermione in the fourth row from the front, saw Dennis Creevey positively shivering with anticipation among the other first years.

He looked around for Javier, and soon the younger boy was sidling up next to him, taking his hand. They stood there like that, waiting.

"Nearly six," said Ron, checking his watch and then staring down the drive that led to the front gates. "How d'you reckon they're coming? The train?"

"I doubt it," said Hermione.

"Why not?" asked Al. "Sounds like a good way to get here. They could take a Portkey to London, take the train here."

"Or," Javier said, "they could just Portkey to Hogsmeade."

"Fair point."

"Or," suggested Ron, "they could Apparate — maybe you're allowed to do it under seventeen wherever they come from?"

"You can't Apparate inside the Hogwarts grounds, how often do I have to tell you?" said Hermione impatiently.

"And anyway, Ron," Al said, "they're probably not going to bring their entire school here. If the rules say only 17 and older, than they're only going to bring those along."

"What? The others aren't going to watch?" Javier asked.

"Hmm... that is a good point. Well I don't know, now. But this school isn't big enough for that many students, even if you open up all the spare classrooms, so shortlisting sounds... oh yeah, and I think one of the Ministry people mentioned they were shortlisting their contenders."

They scanned the darkening grounds excitedly, but nothing was moving; everything was still, silent, and quite as usual. Al was starting to feel cold; he snuggled up to Javier best he could. He wished they'd hurry up. … Maybe the foreign students were preparing a dramatic entrance. … He remembered what Mr. Weasley had said back at the campsite before the Quidditch World Cup: "always the same — we can't resist showing off when we get together. …"

And then Dumbledore called out from the back row where he stood with the other teachers —

"Aha! Unless I am very much mistaken, the delegation from Beauxbatons approaches!"

"Where?" said many students eagerly, all looking in different directions.

" _There_!" yelled a sixth year, pointing over the forest.

Something large, much larger than a broomstick — or, indeed, a hundred broomsticks — was hurtling across the deep blue sky toward the castle, growing larger all the time. Al listened to the younger kids making guesses about it. Javier was staring intently at it.

Right after Dennis Creevy guessed it was a flying house, Javier said with conviction in his voice, "It's a giant carriage carried by Abraxan horses."

Al looked where he was looking. "Interesting guess."

"Not guessing. I can see it from here, quite clearly."

"Oh? I can't see it that well."

Javier shrugged. "What can I say? I have good eyes. I could tell you exactly how many horses there are, if you'd like."

"What _is_ an Abraxan Horse?"

"Flying horses. Like Pegasus, from mythology."

"So why not call them pegasuses, or pegasi?"

"Because Pegasus was the name of an individual flying horse, not a species name."

"Ah, okay."

Sure enough, very soon landed a giant carriage the size of a house pulled by a dozen winged palominos, each the size of an elephant. Everyone stood up a little straighter, including Al, who was wondering why the thing was so huge.

As it turned out, the size of the carriage was explained when out of the carriage stepped a woman so tall and huge that her shiny black shoes were the size of a child's sled. She had to be at least as big as Hagrid, but since he was used to Hagrid, she seemed larger. As she stepped into the light flooding from the entrance hall, she was revealed to have a handsome, olive-skinned face; large, black, liquid-looking eyes; and a rather beaky nose. Her hair was drawn back in a shining knob at the base of her neck. She was dressed from head to foot in black satin, and many magnificent opals gleamed at her throat and on her thick fingers.

"Relative of Hagrid's, you reckon?" Al asked Javier once the hubbub had died down and she and her rather cold-looking students were being seen into the castle.

"Possibly."

Now they just had to wait for Durmstrang to show up. Al was barely listening to the conversation. But he did perk up when Ron heard a sound. Lee soon pointed out the source of the noise was the lake. There were loads of bubbles coming up from somewhere beneath the lake, making it look like it was boiling. Then a gigantic mast came out of the water, the rest of a giant wooden sailing ship reminiscent of a ghost ship came out of a whirlpool. Al had to admit that was pretty impressive.

The ship anchored, then a gangplank hit the ground and a whole bunch of people in heavy furs were disembarking. One of them had furs that were silver, quite a different color from the others. This turned out to be the headmaster, Professor Karkaroff.

Karkaroff had a fruity, unctuous voice; when he stepped into the light pouring from the front doors of the castle they saw that he was tall and thin like Dumbledore, but his white hair was short, and his goatee (finishing in a small curl) did not entirely hide his rather weak chin. When he reached Dumbledore, he shook hands with both of his own.

"Dear old Hogwarts," he said, looking up at the castle and smiling; his teeth were rather yellow, and Al noticed that his smile did not extend to his eyes, which remained cold and shrewd. "How good it is to be here, how good. … Viktor, come along, into the warmth … you don't mind, Dumbledore? Viktor has a slight head cold. …"

Karkaroff beckoned forward one of his students. As the boy passed, Al caught a glimpse of a prominent curved nose and thick black eyebrows. He didn't need the punch on the arm Ron gave him, or the hiss in his ear, to recognize that profile.

"Al — _it's Krum_!"

"Yes, thank you Ron, ever since I lost both my eyes in that tragic marshmallow accident, I've needed you to be my seeing-eye elf. Keep up the good work, you're doing brilliantly."

He gave Ron two thumbs up. Ron gave two of... another finger... to Al, but the two boys laughed to show no hard feelings.

Al was sad when they got into the Great Hall, because Javier had to go back to the Slytherin table, which is where the Durmstrang students ended up sitting. The Beaxbatons students sat at the Ravenclaw table.

At the teachers' table, Filch had added four extra chairs. Plainly two were for the newly arrived headmasters, but he didn't know who the other two were for. Whoever it was had not arrived yet, though.

Al ate, idly listening to the goings-on around him. Ron wanted Krum's autograph but couldn't because there was nothing to write on. Ron also went gaga over a girl that Al hadn't even noticed, one of the Beauxbatons lot, and was claiming she was a veela. Al thought that sounded unlikely; only humans went to magic school as far as he knew. Though he had some questions about Hagrid, Flitwick, and Madam Hooch. Lupin didn't count; as far as Al was concerned, Lupin was a human with a furry problem. Oh, and then there was Snape, who was quite possibly a vampire.

It was some time before the two extra seats got filled. One was Ludo Bagman, and the other one, he realized with a hiss of dislike, was Mr. Alder, the man who had been creepy to Iliana at the Quidditch Cup.

"What the bloody hell is _he_ doing here?" Al asked with disgust.

"Who?"

"Up there, Mr. Alder. Remember him? He was making Iliana very uncomfortable just before the match over the summer."

"Oh Al, he and Bagman organized the match," Hermione said. "Of course they're here to oversee things."

"Well he'd better keep away from us is all I'm gonna say about it."

They had puddings left to eat still. Once they got through them, and the plates went clean again, Dumbledore got up and addressed them all. Al, whose enthusiasm for this tournament was already in the negative numbers, had been put on alert by Alder's presence. He was carefully keeping his eyes on the man, as well as looking around the room occasionally just in case. But he wasn't paying much attention to anything being said, not even Dumbledore's speech. Though some of the others in the collective were listening for him.

Al's attention came back into focus on the proceedings with the mention of the impartial judge that would be deciding who played, and the revelation that it was the "Goblet of Fire." At those words, he thought he knew what was coming, with a sick feeling in his stomach. And sure enough, the box opened up to reveal a roughly carved wooden cup full of blue-white flames.

"Oh _hell_ no!" Al muttered, groaning.

"What?" Ron asked.

" _Chalice of wood, flame within,_ " Al said.

"What?" Ron said, looking confused. Then it clunked in place. " _Oh_."

"Al," Hermione said with concern in her face. "You saw that in your vision?"

"Yes. I recognize it now. I'm more sure than ever I'm gonna get roped into this stupid tournament somehow. Maybe if I run away tonight, I can escape it."

Dumbledore closed the casket and placed the goblet carefully on top of it, where it would be clearly visible to everyone in the Hall.

"Anybody wishing to submit themselves as champion must write their name and school clearly upon a slip of parchment and drop it into the goblet," said Dumbledore. "Aspiring champions have twenty-four hours in which to put their names forward. Tomorrow night, Halloween, the goblet will return the names of the three it has judged most worthy to represent their schools. The goblet will be placed in the entrance hall tonight, where it will be freely accessible to all those wishing to compete.

"To ensure that no underage student yields to temptation," said Dumbledore, "I will be drawing an Age Line around the Goblet of Fire once it has been placed in the entrance hall. Nobody under the age of seventeen will be able to cross this line."

 _ **That's**_ **it** _ **?**_ Al thought at the others. _**A bloody**_ **age line** _ **? Wow, that is perhaps the most insanely insecure form of security they could**_ **possibly** _ **have thought of. I can already think of several ways past that. Older student puts a younger student's name in. Or wad the parchment up and shoot it into the goblet. Or use an owl, or a familiar, or a freaking paper airplane! Age line, sheesh. Might as well just kill me now, spare me the torture.**_

"Finally, I wish to impress upon any of you wishing to compete that this tournament is not to be entered into lightly. Once a champion has been selected by the Goblet of Fire, he or she is obliged to see the tournament through to the end, by a geas, that is to say, a binding magical contract. The placing of your name in the goblet thus means you must compete if chosen, or else you will suffer greatly and, I believe, even die. There can be no change of heart once you have become a champion. Please be very sure, therefore, that you are wholeheartedly prepared to play before you drop your name into the goblet. Now, I think it is time for bed. Good night to you all."

"I'm willing to bet you don't have to put your own name in," Al said. "I'm betting that's the loophole some horrible person is going to use to rope me into this crap. I'm going to escape tonight. Maybe if I'm not here when they put my name in, the binding magical contract won't take effect. Damn! Unless me being here _now_ is enough."

"Oh Al, don't be silly, you can't run away," Hermione said. "You still need your education. And besides, Dumbledore has put an age line up, nobody can get past that if they're not 17 or older."

"Yeah, but there's nothing to stop someone 17 or older from putting in a name that isn't theirs. And anyway, I won't run away for long. Just long enough to get away from being roped into this nonsense. Honestly, why I didn't run away last night, I don't know."

When they got to their dorms, Ron followed Al to his.

"What are you doing?"

"You're not _really_ running away, are you?"

"Tomorrow is Halloween. Something bad has happened every Halloween since I started coming to this mad school, and my parents were killed on a Halloween as well. So yes, I'm running away. Don't worry, I'll just go to Hogsmeade and then Floo home from there. Sirius will understand."

Ron stood there, looking concerned.

"You're not going to try to stop me, are you?"

"Er... no. No, in fact, if you're so keen on going, I reckon someone should go with you. And I reckon that someone should be me."

"Not all the way, surely?"

"Naw, just to Hogsmeade. Just til you Floo out."

"Who's going to see _you_ safely back to the castle, though?"

Ron shrugged. "I'll use your cloak. If you let me."

"Sounds like a plan to me," Al said. "Since I'm not gonna be gone long, I'll just leave my trunk here. It's too heavy to carry anyway."

Al went through his things; before long, he had some Muggle clothes (just in case) and his invisibility cloak. He used a silencing spell on their feet and the two of them slipped under the cloak and headed down carefully.

When they got to the portrait hole, Hermione was standing in the doorway looking resolute.

"Move out of the way, Hermione," Al whispered.

"No. You're not running away because of something that _might_ happen. You're being paranoid."

"Doesn't mean I'm wrong. Anyway, Ron is here with me, and I'm only going home to Sirius, via Floo from Hogsmeade. I'll come back once the Champions have been chosen. Unless I'm one of them, then I'll run farther away."

"If you do that, you'll die, I expect. 'Binding magical contract' and all that."

"Fine, whatever. I'll come back if it picks me, since I don't want to die. Just move, please."

"No. But I'll go with you. Someone has to watch Ron's back on his way back from Hogsmeade."

Al smiled, then remembered she couldn't see him.

"Come on under, then," he said, holding the cloak open for her to join them.

It was a tight fit, all three of them under the cloak, but they fit. They crept through the castle carefully. He tried not to think of getting caught, or what they'd do if they gate was locked.

They made it out the front doors without any problems, and down through the grounds toward the gates. Al reflected that if he was an animagus, he could fly or slither or run or something down there by himself and be perfectly safe. But their progress on the Animagus stuff was not any better. Then, despite his worry about the Triwizard Tournament, he suddenly realized they didn't know the anatomy of any of the animals they'd tried to become. They should study animal anatomy, it might help.

Then they got to the gates. Which were closed. The bars were too close together to squeeze through at their present mass. Which gave him another idea.

A thought, some concentration, and then the body had shrunk down to Zoey's form. Before her friends could react, she was out from under the cloak and sliding through the bars of the gate.

"Sorry guys, I'll be fine from here," she said as, with another thought, they grew in size again and became somewhat doglike. It wasn't a very good form, but it was faster than being human. They ignored Hermione's and Ron's cries, and ran down toward Hogsmeade. Freedom! They'd done it! Free-

"YIP!" they cried, as someone grabbed them by the scruff of their neck and lifted them up.

"What're you lot doin' outta bounds a' this time o' night, eh?" said a familiar voice. They whined, but if they were going to be caught by anybody, best it was Hagrid.

"An' lookin like tha', no less! D'yeh realize not evryone knows yeh can do tha'? Yeh coulda been anything, summun could kill yeh with a spell an' not know they was doin murder!"

They whined again.

"Get back to yer normal form, then."

He set them down and soon Al was standing there, fully human.

"So where d'ya think yer goin', eh?"

"I'm scared someone will put my name in that bloody goblet of fire. I was hoping that running back to Sirius, back to London, would make me immune."

"Oh, yeh think distance matters in magic, do yeh?"

"Yes. It has to. Otherwise someone could put, I dunno, Minister Fudge's name in the goblet and he'd have to compete."

"I dunno about that, seein as he's not in school anymore."

"I don't know how smart or stupid that Goblet is."

"Hmm... good point. But cummon, let's git you back up ter the-"

CRACK! went the night. Al had popped his wand into his hand and Disapparated without a license, so strong was his desire to get away.

Hagrid looked down at the ground where Al had been. What he saw made his face turn white.

"Galopin gargoyles!" Hagrid said.

That had not, as it turned out, been a good idea. Al arrived inside the only part of their home that he could without opening the wards, which he hadn't known how to do from so far away. But that wasn't the problem; his problem was he was missing a foot, and bleeding onto the hearth.

"AHH!" he screamed, going down in agony. "SIRIUS!"

He heard someone leap down the stairs and come running into the room. He looked up; Sirius had his wand out and was looking wildly around. He spotted Al, and his face went from panic to confusion to panic _and_ confusion in a very short space of time.

"What the...?"

"Splinched... myself..."

Sirius opened the wards and stopped the bleeding with his wand. The pain was still there, but it was more bearable now.

"Come on, gotta get you to St. Mungo's," Sirius said, taking Al over his shoulder and tossing Floo powder in.

"St. Mungo's Hospital," Sirius barked once they were inside the green flames.

They spun around through the warm darkness, Al in too much pain to get sick, and out into the bright light of what would have been a perfectly normal reception room if not for witches and wizards that Al barely noticed, all in clear distress of different magical varieties.

"Wait there," said the witch at the desk before Sirius had even said anything, pressing a button as she did. "Healers are on their way right now. Where is the missing appendage?"

"Probably at Hogwarts," Sirius said. "Is that right, Al?"

Al nodded. "Outside the gate," he said weakly. "Hagrid is there."

By a lucky coincidence, a Floo fire came up in a nearby grate. Dumbledore stepped through, Al's foot in his hand.

"I believe this is the missing appendage," Dumbledore said mildly, handing it to one of the Healers who were swarming around Al.

Within minutes, Al felt the foot be reattached with a puff of purple smoke. The pain didn't go away entirely, but it felt a lot better, aside from the pins and needles feeling that was spreading through his foot. The Healers gave him some potions, and one of them was putting a soothing salve on the place where the foot had been reattached.

The emergency over with now, the Healers told Sirius and Dumbledore as much. Almost immediately, Sirius rounded on Al.

"What were you thinking? Why did you leave the school? What happened, anyway? Were you attacked?"

"Not yet," Al said weakly.

"Not yet? What do you mean?"

" _Chalice of wood, flame within_ ," Al intoned. He heard Dumbledore say 'Ah' in sudden understanding.

"What?" Sirius said. "What's he on about, Dumbledore? I mean, I know that's from his vision, but is there something I'm missing?"

"The Triwizard Tournament began tonight. The Goblet of Fire, which is used to pick the contestants, is made of wood, but is filled with fire." He turned to Al. "So you saw the Goblet and thought it was the one in your vision? But why did that prompt you to run, Alastair?"

"It _was_ the thing I saw in my vision. And I don't want to be part of that damn tournament. Had a feeling... someone's gonna put my name in it. Sh—tuff happens to me every bloody Halloween. People trying to kill me every year. And your 'security' would be laughable if the situation wasn't so serious. An age line, really? I can think of half a dozen ways past that off the top o' my head."

Sirius nodded. "Normally I'd say you were listening too well to Moody, but given that it's you, pup, I guess a little paranoia is understandable. But you should've gone to Dumbledore."

"Couldn't risk him thinking I was overreacting. He might've said no. Adults aren't exactly reliable, in my experience. Except possibly for you, Sirius. And anyway, this wouldn't have happened if Hagrid hadn't caught me. I couldn't get through the bars. Had to leave the Cloak behind. Zoey slipped between the bars. Tier got us halfway down to Hogsmeade before Hagrid caught us."

"Why Hogsmeade?"

"Was gonna Floo over here."

"And you left your father's cloak behind?"

"Not to worry, Sirius," Dumbledore said. "Mister Ronald Weasley and Miss Hermione Granger had it. No, Al, they will not get into trouble this time. Nor will you. I believe splinching yourself would be punishment enough anyway, but given that you were genuinely afraid for your life, I will not punish you, nor your friends for helping you. But I should mention, also, that from what I know of the Goblet of Fire, it would not matter how far you were from it if someone puts your name in, except that there are grave consequences if you run away while under its geas. So you might as well return to school."

"That is completely daft, sir. What if someone put Cornelius Fudge's name in?"

"The Goblet of Fire _is_ intelligent enough to know whether someone is still in school or not. Only those who are students may be selected by the Goblet of Fire. Which I know is no comfort to you, but-"

"Expel me, then. Just for a day or two, or whatever."

Dumbledore sighed, but with a slight twinkle in his eye. "I would love to help you feel more secure, Alastair, I really would. But while I could easily expel you, the process of being reinstated takes rather a long time. Also, such attempts have rarely been successful. It is not a feasible solution, Alastair."

"You sure I couldn't run to the US? Or Australia?"

"I do not know the exact range of the Goblet, Alastair, but it is an extremely old and extremely powerful artifact. I believe it best not to try your luck."

Al sighed.

"The wizarding world is bloody insane, you know that, right?"

"The Muggle world is full of its own insanities. Of course, you must also bear in mind that the Goblet of Fire is hundreds, possibly thousands, of years old. Much has changed in that time. If the Goblet of Fire had been made this past year, those under 17 would not even be able to be considered by it. As it is, I had to put the age line up. But you have pointed out that there are greater securities that have to be put in place."

"How about inspecting every name someone wants to put in before they do it?"

"I'm afraid that such an action would discourage many people from putting in their names. And there is likely some way around that anyway. Also, the Goblet has been unattended for several hours already. Doing such a thing would be no guarantee."

Al sighed. He was glad Dumbledore was taking his fear seriously, even if he wasn't being much of a help otherwise.

Dumbledore sighed as well. "I very much hope your fears turn out to be groundless, Alastair. If you do end up having to participate, the other two school heads will be very angry with me for letting it happen, even though there's little to be done. But we shall cross that bridge if we get to it."

"Couldn't you put, I dunno, a spy spell on the room it's in? I know it might be futile, but it might help, too."

"Yes, I believe I shall indeed do that. If only to ease your mind and mine. In the meantime... am I correct in assuming that the only time you have been unobserved by others since the Goblet was lit was the time between escaping the grounds and getting caught by Hagrid?"

"Yeah. And the minute or two between me Disapparating and Sirius finding me. Why?"

"If we continue to have you under observation, and someone has indeed put your name in the Goblet, we shall be able to provide memories to prove that you could not have done it yourself."

"Er... I'm not going to get spied on in the bathroom, am I?"

"No. Apparating within the grounds can only be done by House Elves. We shall have to conveniently forget to mention that you have a House Elf who is a friend of yours. I do not feel such information would be relevant, after all. And most wizards would not even think of it."

"So does that mean Ron is going to be sleeping in my room? Wait... sleeping? For your plan to work, sir, someone will have to watch me sleep. Which is creepy."

"I can do it, Dumbledore," Sirius said. "I can accompany him as a dog and watch him all night long, so he and Ron can both get some sleep."

"You will be able to do that, Sirius?"

"After tonight's excitement, I don't think I could sleep anyway."

"Then it shall be so. You're registered, but I doubt if many know you're an Animagus. Though you _are_ an awfully _large_ dog, Sirius."

"I'm a loveable dog, though. I doubt I'll scare anyone. And if I do, we can make it up to them somehow."

"Good. Now that's settled, I shall speak with the Healers. It occurs to me now that you may not need to return to the castle, Sirius. The Healers may wish to keep Alastair overnight."

Dumbledore left, and Al turned to look at Sirius. He finally noticed that Sirius was wearing his favorite Grateful Dead t-shirt, purple sweat-pants, and fuzzy green slippers.

"Fashionable," Al said.

Sirius laughed. "I sure am. But don't try to distract me with irrelevancies, Al. I understand your fear, but instead of running away, you should have asked McGonagall if you could fire-call me. If you had, I'd have come to get you right away, and you wouldn't have splinched yourself."

"Oh. Oops. Well, I'll keep that in mind for next time, assuming I live that long."

Sirius leaned over and hugged Al in a tight embrace.

"Please don't scare me like that again, any of you."

Al nodded. "We'll try not to."

"Good."

An awkward silence rose up. Casting around for something to say, Al said, "Green slippers, huh? They run out of pink? I think pink would look good on you."

Sirius laughed. "I'll keep that in mind. I do actually like pink. It's not my favorite, but it's okay. Back in my grandfather's day, pink was the color they dressed little boys in, and blue was for girls. Then at some point, the meanings of the two colors switched. I heard rumors the switch originated in the Muggle world, and spread to us by osmosis."

"Osmosis, eh? I didn't know wizards knew that word."

"I don't think most _do_. Anyway, you should rest now, I expect. It's late anyway, and you're recovering."

"Okay, Sirius."

As Dumbledore predicted, the Healers did indeed want to keep Al overnight. Sirius stayed in the room as a human, watching Al as he fell asleep. He was still in place hours later, when Al woke up. Al went to the bathroom, and then Sirius saw him down to the reception room of the hospital, where he used the Floo back to Dumbledore's office. Professor McGonagall met Al there and escorted him down to the Great Hall for breakfast.

He had barely sat down when Ron and Hermione came rushing in and sat down beside him.

"What happened, Al? We saw Hagrid running up to the castle with your foot in his hand! He said you'd splinched yourself!"

"You just answered your own question, there," Al said. "Hagrid caught us halfway to Hogsmeade, literally caught us in his hand. When he let me go, probably on the presumption I'd go willingly with him, I Disapparated. I guess I was just that desperate. But it was a bad idea, as you saw part of. Damn, I bled all over Sirius's floor last night before he stopped the bleeding. I ended up going to Saint Mungo's. They put me back together again, and I stayed overnight for observation."

He he continued on with the rest of the tale, what he and Sirius and Dumbledore had talked about, and the plan to keep him under scrutiny so it could be shown he hadn't put his own name in, if it happened.

The tale finished, he went back to his food. But he'd only been eating a few minutes when Fred and George came in looking like the cats who ate the canaries.

"Done it," Fred said in a triumphant whisper to Al, Ron, and Hermione. "Just taken it."

"What?" said Ron.

"The Aging Potion, dung brains," said Fred.

"One drop each," said George, rubbing his hands together with glee. "We only need to be a few months older."

"We're going to split the thousand Galleons between the three of us if one of us wins," said Lee, grinning broadly.

"I'm not sure this is going to work, you know," said Hermione warningly "I'm sure Dumbledore will have thought of this."

Fred, George, and Lee ignored her.

"Ready?" Fred said to the other two, quivering with excitement. "C'mon, then — I'll go first —"

Al watched as they got out the parchments with their names on them, and stepped forward to put their names in. But they didn't get nearly close enough when they were shoved out by a magical force, and grew long white beards, like miniature Dumbledores.

The entrance hall rang with laughter. Even Fred and George joined in, once they had gotten to their feet and taken a good look at each other's beards.

"I did warn you," said a deep, amused voice, and everyone turned to see Professor Dumbledore coming out of the Great Hall. He surveyed Fred and George, his eyes twinkling. "I suggest you both go up to Madam Pomfrey. She is already tending to Miss Fawcett, of Ravenclaw, and Mr. Summers, of Hufflepuff, both of whom decided to age themselves up a little too. Though I must say, neither of their beards is anything like as fine as yours."

"Hey guys," Al whispered, catching them before they left for the hospital wing. "Have someone old enough put your names in. Or use an owl, or a paper airplane. The more people like you who apply, the lesser the chance some berk can get me chosen against my will."

"Gotcha, Al, that's a great idea," Fred said.

"Yeah, I can't believe we didn't think of it ourselves," said George.

Al went back to the table feeling only slightly less anxious. He really hoped Fred or George would get chosen, so he wouldn't. If anyone could do it, they could; they were very clever, and they deserved the money.

Looking around at all the decorations, reflecting that he'd probably actually like Halloween if crazy stuff didn't always happen on it every year, Al led the way over to Dean and Seamus, who were discussing those Hogwarts students of seventeen or over who might be entering.

"There's a rumor going around that Warrington got up early and put his name in," Dean told Al. "That big bloke from Slytherin who looks like a sloth."

Iliana, who had played Quidditch against Warrington, shook Al's head in disgust.

"He'll probably be disqualified on the grounds of being a chimpanzee," Al said.

"Yeah," said Ron. "We can't have a Slytherin Champion!"

"I disagree. It would depend on the Slytherin. Much as I hate the little berk, Malfoy is clever enough to win; he's always right behind Hermione in grades. Anyway, I'd nominate Javier if he wasn't abysmal at dueling."

"And all the Hufflepuffs are talking about Diggory," said Seamus contemptuously. "But I wouldn't have thought he'd have wanted to risk his good looks."

"Lay off Diggory, okay? Honestly, to hate someone just because they won some stupid game," Al said.

"Stupid game-" Seamus started indignantly.

"Listen!" said Hermione suddenly, cutting Seamus off.

People were cheering out in the entrance hall. They all swiveled around in their seats and saw Angelina Johnson coming into the Hall, grinning in an embarrassed sort of way. A tall black girl who played Chaser on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, Angelina came over to them, sat down, and said, "Well, I've done it! Just put my name in!"

"You're kidding!" said Ron, looking impressed.

"Are you seventeen, then?" asked Al.

" 'Course she is, can't see a beard, can you?" said Ron.

"I had my birthday last week," said Angelina.

"Well, I'm glad someone from Gryffindor's entering," said Hermione. "I really hope you get it, Angelina!"

"Thanks, Hermione," said Angelina, smiling at her.

"Yeah, better you than Pretty-Boy Diggory," said Seamus, causing several Hufflepuffs passing their table to scowl heavily at him.

"Don't be a berk," Al loudly said to Seamus, so the Hufflepuffs would hear him. "Diggory has brains as well as good looks, and Hufflepuff deserves some glory." He surreptitiously glanced at the Hufflepuffs; they looked pleased by his words.

"Why are you defending him, Al?" Seamus asked hotly. " _And_ calling Quidditch stupid. You _play_ Quidditch!"

"No I don't. Iliana does. I can barely stay on a broom at all, and even if I could, the game is utterly ruined by the snitch. And anyway, it wasn't his fault he won that one time, it was Iliana's for falling off the broom. And the dementors, for making it happen. Cedric tried to call for a rematch, or did you forget?"

Seamus looked abashed. "Oh yeah, I forgot. Still, I don't get why you're defending him. Unless you fancy him?"

Al felt his face going hot, but it was with anger.

"What do you mean by that?" he said in a deceptively calm, quiet voice, filled with ice.

"I just mean, I've seen you hangin' around with that Slytherin weirdo. Hear he's your boyfriend, too. But then you defend Diggory, so I dunno, maybe you're only with the weirdo snake because you can't have Cedric, since you're a weirdo yourself. I guess birds of a feather flock together."

He glared at Seamus, feeling his blood boil. Maybe it was his fears making him edgy, or something else, but Al wanted to lash out at someone.

"I will not listen to you insult my boyfriend. I challenge you to a duel!" Al shouted.

Seamus blinked, but recovered quickly. "That so? Right, then, Potter. Dean's my second, right Dean?"

"Uh... I guess. Yes."

"Right, that's settled. Who's _your_ second?"

"I am," Ron said.

"Name your time and place, Potter."

"Five minutes from now, out on the grounds by the lake."

"You're on."

They glared at each other, and Seamus stormed off. Al followed him a few paces behind.

"Al, what are you doing?" Hermione asked, worried, as she struggled to keep up with him.

"He angered me. And he called Javier and I weirdos. That's _our_ term, Hermione. _He_ doesn't get to call us that."

A few minutes later, they were in place. Seamus was in front of him. Hermione was refereeing, since she couldn't stop it from happening, try as she might.

"Nothing below the belt," she said resignedly. "Nothing dangerous, right? Just disarm or knock the other person down, or both. Agreed?"

The two boys nodded curtly, glaring at each other.

"Bow to each other. Good. Okay, on the count of three then. One, two, THREE!"

She jumped back. The crowd that had formed around them kept its distance as they circled each other, wands pointing at one another.

"EXPELIARMUS!" Seamus shouted. Al blocked it with a shield charm.

Seamus shot another spell at him, and again he blocked it.

Al just let Seamus do all the offensive magic for over a minute, Seamus using a variety of different jinxes like the tickling jinx, jelly-legs, and _Locomotor mortis,_ Al ducking or blocking easily, his eyes locked on Seamus's eyes the whole time. In fact, Hermione noticed something rather interesting... Al was already moving out of the way or moving into position to shield before Seamus had even begun to form a spell with his mouth, and he was doing it consistently. Almost like he knew what Seamus was going to do before he did it.

After playing with his opponent for nearly five whole minutes, Al struck. Seamus started to mouth a spell, and in the same instant, Al shot a _non-verbal_ spell at Seamus; red spell-light hit Seamus and knocked him to the ground, his wand flying from his hand. Al grinned smugly, bowed to the throng, put his wand away, and walked away through the silent, staring crowd.

He found himself going down toward Hagrid's. Hermione and Ron soon caught up.

"That was wicked! You didn't even _say_ anything! And the way you kept dodging his spells! It was bloody brilliant!"

"Yes," Hermione said, sounding suspicious. "I'm very curious how you managed that. You seemed to be reading his mind."

"Not quite. But the answer is simple enough, if you think about it."

"Oh?" Ron said, confused.

"He's talking about his heart-reading power. He was reading Seamus's mind, or soul, or whatever. It takes an entire second for a command to go from the brain to a limb, and most of our decisions are made by the subconscious mind before we 'decide' consciously to do it. Al would've had plenty of time to react to what he was seeing in Seamus's mind before Seamus could do what he'd planned. Al, that's... I don't know if it's cheating or not, but it feels like it."

Al shrugged. "Dunno. Don't care. I have an advantage. I'm not going to refrain from using it just to be fair. I'm not a Hufflepuff. I'm a Griffindor on the cusp of Slytherin. Anyway, we haven't visited Hagrid in ages, let's go."

Hermione folded her arms and shivered. "I've just noticed it's freezing out here, and I don't have a cloak."

He froze, then turned back toward the school. "Yeah, now that you mention it, I'm a bit chilly too."

"Well that was an education," Al said on their way back from Hagrid's. "So Hagrid fancies Madame Maxime. Interesting."

Ron balked. "If they end up having children, they'll be setting a world record — bet any baby of theirs would weigh about a ton."

Al just nodded absent-mindedly. He was too preoccupied by his fears to comment on this. He was anxious for this day to be over so he could escape these fears. Fears that were eating him up inside. While others were eating sparingly out of excitement and the fact this was the second feast in two nights, he wasn't eating because he felt like his stomach was made of something very horrible and uncomfortable. He had barely eaten at all when the food vanished and Dumbledore was ready to start finding out who was going to be Champion for their respective school.

He didn't chew his nails, but he felt tempted to as the Goblet spat out its first name – Fleur DeLacour, the girl Ron thought was a veela. The other boys and girls of Beauxbaton looked very disappointed. Some of them were even crying. Al almost felt like joining them. He watched as Fleur left for a room behind the teacher's table.

Out came another name: Viktor Krum, for Durmstrang. This bloody goblet was going to drag his agony out as long as possible, obviously. Krum joined Fleur shortly in the room behind the front table.

One last name to come. The Goblet seemed to wait ages and eons to spit this name out, but finally it did; like the other two times, the flames changed color, and out came a scorched bit of parchment.

"Cedric Diggory!" Dumbledore called out, winking at Al.

Al relaxed. He almost laughed with relief. He'd escaped it. His fears had been-

Something was happening. Dumbledore had been mid-speech, clearly also convinced the danger was over, when the Goblet's fire changed color again, and spat out another name.

Al didn't hear the name that came out. He didn't need to anyway, but he couldn't have heard the name being said, because he was too busy being passed out on the floor.


	26. Chandra Rahasyamay

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 26"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-six:** **Chandra Rahasyamay**

Note 1: Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _Note 3: I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _#__ _and_ _ _{Tier}__ _if I ever get around to it_ _ _.__

 _Note four: This chapter will be from multiple points of view. Chandra isn't good with words yet, and his thought processes are rather odd. So a lot of his characterization is best seen from outside perspectives._

 _Note five: Chandra Rahasyamay is_ _ _not__ _based on anyone in our own collective, so far as we know. Which makes him unique so far in this story, as everyone else in the Potter collective is based on someone in the Fayanora collective. (Even the mysterious "Mother.")_

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

 _ **Chapter blurb:**_ Alastair Potter passed out just as every name in the Potter collective thus far came out of the Goblet of Fire... save for one name. Chandra Rahasyamay, previously only seen in the Potter collective's dreams, has come out at last. Everyone else in the collective has mysteriously vanished, leaving Chandra on his own with an incomplete amnesia. In this chapter he struggles in school, and everyone else struggles to comprehend his odd manner of speaking. Will he be able to figure his magic out before the First Task?

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

There were no words, only feelings and images. Words were still so new to him, and Mother had been there to guide him before. But now, he was alone. Alone, and suddenly dealing with sensory inputs that had been little more than abstract concepts until now. The pressure of gravity pulling on the body, the smooth hardness of the stone beneath him, the dark pinkness as light pierced his eyelids, these on their own might overwhelm him. It was like living one's life in the water, and suddenly coming ashore; he was in pain, and weak, and... yes, he was certain now: overwhelmed. And so he dared not open his eyes.

People were saying words to him. They were just noises at the moment, no more comprehensible than birdsong. But a sense that was new to him was assailing his mind; he felt their concern, their worry. Others were curious, still more were angry. He did not like the anger, it was like being whipped with a red-hot metal flail, and made him whimper. Not that the concern felt much better; that was like the sensation after your foot has fallen asleep, but all over his body.

He also thought, somehow, that they were talking to one another as well. But it was still noise to him. The sounds were like a vise tightening around his head, and they contained no information for him.

Just then, he felt a soothing presence, like a fresh breeze blowing from over a freshwater lake on a warm summer day, mixed with the pleasant warmth of sunshine in spring. With this, the sensory inputs became easier to process, the pain leaving like the ocean tide going out. What was more, the words were making sense now.

He smiled; Mother had come to his rescue again. With Her help, he could do this.

Albus Dumbledore hurried over to Alastair as soon as the boy had passed out, only to find someone new on the floor. He blinked. From what Sirius had told him, he suspected he knew who the new Potter was, but he couldn't be sure. Nor did he know why the Indian boy had chosen this moment to make his first appearance.

As he watched, the boy went from the calm of unconsciousness to tensing up in a fetal position, whimpering, his eyes watering. The boy looked to be in quite a lot of pain, the physical kind, which hurt Albus's heart.

He told someone to fetch Madam Pomfrey, quickly. As they ran off, he knelt at the boy's side and felt his skin. The boy flinched at the touch, so Albus pulled back. But he'd felt a lot, and was seeing a lot now. The boy was suffering cold sweats, his coppery skin getting paler before Dumbledore's eyes.

"What happened?" Madam Pomfrey said, bustling in as fast as she could. "Dumbledore?"

"It would appear there is a new Potter. I do not know what is wrong with him, but he is in a lot of pain."

Madam Pomfrey knelt, Dumbledore standing up and back to give her room. She waved her wand over the boy, making small noises of concern as she did.

"Alastair Potter passed out," Dumbledore explained to her, "and then this boy appeared, unconscious."

"His symptoms remind me of dementor attacks," she said.

"None here, as far as I am aware." Then he looked thoughtful before continuing. "He flinched when I touched him."

She nodded, and shone a light from her wand into the boy's closed eyes. He flinched and turned away, yowling like a wounded animal.

"Sensitivity to light."

She stowed her wand and clapped her hands once, loudly. He flinched again and yowled. But the yowl died away.

"And sensitivity to sound, as well. Unfortunately, that doesn't really narrow it down. Could be a migraine. Or else-"

She'd stopped talking because the boy was relaxing all of a sudden. Still twitching at times, but no longer in pain. She checked for a pulse; he didn't flinch very much when she did.

"Well he's still alive. Seems to have gotten better. Since I didn't do anything, I'd guess he'd been suffering from psychological distress."

His eyes opened a crack. Dumbledore only noticed this because he'd been looking at the time.

"Ah, Poppy, he has opened his eyes."

She ran some more tests with her wand while he lay there. Dumbledore used his legilimency to see what was going on in the boy's mind, and was surprised when he didn't see anything. He wasn't being blocked, just... nothing. He looked again, and saw a bubbling brook through a forest. 'Most peculiar,' Dumbledore thought. It was the only image he was getting.

"Hello?" Dumbledore said cautiously.

The boy's eyes turned to Dumbledore. Now Dumbledore saw in his mind's eye an image of himself, from the outside. Then an image of what looked like the Sahara. But between the two... had he imagined it? Had he really seen a dark-skinned woman with unnaturally-colored eyes, for just a split second?

"Are you Chandra Rahasyamay?" Dumbledore asked.

Chandra nodded.

"Ah, good. Can you speak?"

Chandra looked thoughtful for a moment. Then, with a determined look on his face, he opened his mouth. He paused again, looking confused. Then he opened his mouth again.

"Silver Grandfather, with the fire-bird," Chandra said, in an American accent. "The red and the gold. The silver and the blue. Starlight in the day."

"Ah, well that's... an answer, of sorts." Dumbledore said. "Can you sit up?"

Not speaking, Chandra struggled to move his limbs. He winced with every movement, apparently still in pain. He also shook with weakness, his skin going pale and sweaty again.

"The mountain," he said weakly through gritted teeth. "Bare stone, smooth, unlined."

"Don't strain yourself, or Madam Pomfrey will give me such a tongue-lashing."

Chandra relaxed. He lay there, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Madam Pomfrey left to fetch something. A few minutes later, she had returned with pain-relief potion and a Pepper-Up Potion. He drank each potion readily, and soon was able to sit up.

A few minutes more passed before Dumbledore asked, "Do you think you can stand now? It's just that you are required elsewhere. I have them waiting, of course. I do not know how much of this you understand, but someone had written every single name from your collective on that parchment but yours. It does not match the handwriting of anyone in your collective, to my knowledge. And I do not believe that makes a difference, I'm sorry to say."

"Chalice of fire, flame within," Chandra said. "Struggle and conflict, thrice, or else all is silence."

"Yes, exactly. Are you able to stand?"

"The wind has receded," Chandra said, standing up with some difficulty.

"I... see," Dumbledore said, which was a lie. He was not sure if there was any sense to Chandra's words or not. If there was, he wasn't able to decipher it yet. Parts of it made sense, and other parts eluded meaning.

Helping Chandra walk by letting the boy lean on him, Dumbledore led him slowly back to the room where the other champions and the judges still waited, if Minerva had anything to say about it on his behalf.

"Dumblydorr, at last! What 'as been so important zat you 'ave kept us waiting so long?" asked Madam Maxime imperiously.

"We've had rather an unusual complication. A fourth piece of parchment came out of the Goblet of Fire, and a fourth, rather unexpected, champion."

"What is ze meaning of zis, Dumbly-dorr?" she said imperiously.

"I'd rather like to know that myself, Dumbledore," said Professor Karkaroff. He was wearing a steely smile, and his blue eyes were like chips of ice. " _Two_ Hogwarts champions? I don't remember anyone telling me the host school is allowed two champions — or have I not read the rules carefully enough?"

He gave a short and nasty laugh.

"And 'oo iz zis second champion? Is it zis boy? 'oo are you?"

"That's part of the complication, Olympe. Have you heard of the child-who-lived?"

"You mean 'arry Potter?"

"Her name is Adira Potter now, Olympe. And, er..."

He spent a few minutes trying to explain the Potters' situation to everyone in the room.

"So you expect us to believe, Dumbledore," said Karkaroff, "that this boy is... is... some sort of freak of nature?"

"Please do not use that term, Igor."

Karkaroff drew himself up indignantly. "I shall use whatever terms I wish, Dumbledore! You are not the boss of me. I do not buy your ridiculous-"

"Dumbledore isn't lying, Karakaroff," said the harsh voice of Moody, who had just stumped into the room.

Karkaroff looked at Moody with the pale face of fear. Then he grew defiant again.

"Is that so?"

"It _is_ , Karkaroff. The Potters are an odd case. Possibly unique. Five—no, _six_ —minds in one body, unless there's more banging about in there. And they each change the body's appearance when they switch."

"'e is a metamorphmagus. I 'ave never heard such ridiculous lies before! I 'ave-"

"Maybe I wasn't clear," said Moody. "Potter having a load of other people sharing her body with her isn't what makes her unique. Plenty of that sort of thing going on in other people, the Muggles call it Multiple Personality Disorder, I think. What makes Potter here unique is the transformations when they switch. Most people with their condition don't do that. Most of 'em are so good at pretending to be a single person, out of necessity, that they go through their whole lives keeping the secret without anyone suspecting. Potter here just had the bad luck to not have a choice in whether to keep the secret or not."

"Be that as it may, Moody," Karkaroff growled, "that's hardly the point. Whatever madness Potter has is no excuse for him to sneak into the tournament!"

"Igor, be reasonable," Dumbledore said. "The Goblet of Fire only recognizes three schools, and only assigns one champion per each. Five out of six of the Potters' names were written on this piece of parchment under a fourth school. The only reason the sixth name isn't on here is because this is Chandra's first appearance, today. And as far as I can tell, the handwriting does not match any of the Potters."

"Yeah, Karakaroff," Moody said. "and the Goblet is ancient and powerful. It would take an extremely powerful, well educated, and skilled witch or wizard to bamboozle such a powerful object into assigning two champions to a school."

"But surely 'e will not be allowed to compete!" shouted Fleur. "'e is too young! Zis little boy, compete wis us? I sink not!"

"Yes, we were under the impression that your Age Line would keep out younger contestants, Dumbledore," said Karkaroff, his steely smile still in place, though his eyes were colder than ever. "Otherwise, we would, of course, have brought along a wider selection of candidates from our own schools."

"It's no one's fault but Potter's, Karkaroff," said Snape softly. His black eyes were alight with malice. "Don't go blaming Dumbledore for Potter's determination to break rules. She-he-they have been crossing lines ever since they arrived here —"

"Thank you, Severus," said Dumbledore firmly, and Snape went quiet, though his eyes still glinted malevolently through his curtain of greasy black hair.

"The age line works," Dumbledore said calmly and confidently, "but that point is moot. One does not have to put one's own name in the Goblet. An older student, or even an adult, may have put it in.

"Therefore, I do not believe any of the Potters put their own name in. But there is more. One of them, Alastair, is a seer. His prophecy did not make sense to him until he saw the Goblet of Fire. He saw it, and became terrified of it, wanting nothing to do with the tournament. He even went so far as to splinch himself while trying to run away. He begged me to expel him so he wouldn't have to compete. And the Potters have been in the eye of one person or another since the Goblet was taken out of the casket. I can collect memories for my pensieve if you need convincing."

Karkaroff waved this off almost casually. "Yes, yes, Dumbledore, but that is moot. He cannot compete, that is that. There are only three Champions!"

"Ludo?" Dumbledore said to Bagman.

"I think he has to compete, but I'm not sure. Mister Alder?"

The tall, barrel-chested man stepped forward. "Well, I've been over the rule book front to back, several times. I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing, after Crouch was fired. But Ludo's right. It's a binding magical contract. Tampering or not, he has to compete, or else he dies."

The argument continued for several more minutes despite this, but finally the angry headmasters of the other schools grudgingly agreed and left in a huff. Dumbledore was finally able to pull away. He turned to Chandra, and found the boy with a Muggle sketch pad and pen in hand, halfway through a drawing made of dots of red or blue ink. The pen was the kind you could click to switch between colors. He noticed the boy was left handed, the only southpaw in the collective that he knew of.

"Chandra?" Dumbledore said. "How are you?"

Chandra's response was to sing a song, but using 'la la la' instead of lyrics. The song was not familiar to Dumbledore. He made a note to remember to hum the tune to Sirius later, in case he knew it. Sirius had been very much into Muggle music when he was younger. Any information that might help him understand this new person would be welcome.

"Will you come with me to my office, Chandra?"

Chandra didn't answer in words. Instead, he clicked his pen closed and stood up.

"This way, please."

It was a short walk from there, but Dumbledore still kept an eye on the boy, who had conjured a sort of portable desk for himself that was strapped to his body, and was drawing and walking at the same time, somehow without running into anything.

"Pumpkin pasty," Dumbledore said to the gargoyle. It moved aside, and he led Chandra up to his office.

Chandra was still drawing when they were both seated at the headmaster's desk. Dumbledore watched him in silence for many minutes, going over the puzzle of this new person in his mind as he did.

It wasn't until Chandra paused his drawing and looked up that Dumbledore decided to speak.

"I wonder, Chandra, if you could summon one of the others to speak with your mouth."

Chandra went back to his drawing, but said, "Smooth mountain. Underground river. No," he corrected himself, "serpent-king cavern, but my tongue is not presently forked."

"Hmm... are you saying they are... elsewhere? That you can't speak with them?"

"Yes. The ghost with rivers from her eyes is within the void. Until she exists again, my tongue remains round."

'The ghost with rivers from her eyes? Does he mean Myrtle Warren?'

"Do you mean the ghost known as Moaning Myrtle?"

"Yes. She is in the void. The Many Faces rest in the serpent-king chamber within. I cannot Speak until she exists."

'He's speaking in metaphors, images,' Dumbledore thought. 'But why? Is that how he thinks?'

"So the others are hiding somewhere, and you can't speak with them because you're missing the knowledge of how to get to where they are?"

"It is dust in the wind," Chandra said. "The candle is out. I fumble for a match. But the prickling on my skin can cease; they have their own light down there." He paused, looking up as though trying to remember something, before going back to his drawing and saying, "They have the key."

"So they can come back whenever they choose?"

"Yes. The children cower under the bed. But their fear's candle will melt away."

"Ah, I see. They all became overwhelmed with terror, but they'll return in time."

"Yes. Mother will soothe their fears."

Dumbledore made his hands into a steeple, regarding Chandra as he drew. It was inconvenient that the boy kept his eyes on his artwork. But then, the images he'd gotten from his legilimency earlier hadn't been very useful.

"Is this 'Mother' a metaphor or someone real?"

"Are any of us more than a metaphor? A lightning storm in a bottle made of meat. Each of us a society, the tempest a government, trillions of citizens made of water and chemicals, G.A.C.T., G.A.C.U. My own meat hosts a world of nations."

"Is 'Mother' one of these nations?"

Chandra struggled with this one for several minutes.

"Mother, a nation? No. A sack of pebbles cannot pluck a flower. Blow out that candle, light another. Mother is... Mother." Another lengthy pause. "Hmm... no other candles emerge. Well, if we are nations, Mother is the earth, the air, and the water. Mother is us. Mother is the tempest. Mother is all of it. Yes, She makes a tempest to speak for Her. But that tempest is a mask. The face is too big to comprehend."

"Do you mean that Mother is a goddess?"

"I fumble for a match again. Mother is..." his wand popped out of its holster, and he stared at it. "Mother is this, but not this. Mother is the this behind the this."

"Mother is... magic itself?"

"You approach it. Magic is... Magic is to Mother as Mother's mask is to Her face. Or as your hand is to you. Yes, that is the brightest light."

Chandra put the wand away and went back to his drawing.

Dumbledore was still confused. Did he mean Mother was Life? He was going to ask, but Chandra spoke first.

"The sun sets. The pup needs to return to its den or the black father will bark at the silver grandfather."

"Silver grandfather?"

"Yes. Silver Grandfather, with the fire-bird. With the star twinkling in the daylight of his eyes. _You_ , is the candle I'm trying to light."

"Ah. And the black father is Sirius Black, I take it?"

"Yes. The black dog will bark at you if the pup is kept awake too long."

"Indeed. As well he should. I do apologize for taking up so much of your time, but your manner of speaking is challenging to understand."

"Mountain with few cracks?" he asked.

"Yes, I believe that is a good metaphor. It is doable, but makes me sweat a lot, so to speak."

"The mountain will come to a path in time. Then you will walk, not climb."

"Good to know. Thank you. But yes, you should run along to your den, little pup."

"Thank you, silver grandfather."

Chandra had completed his drawing. It was a picture of Dumbledore behind the Goblet of Fire. He put it away and looked around himself as he left Dumbledore's office.

Dumbledore sighed, and tossed a handful of Floo powder into the fire. He then knelt down and stuck his head in the green flames.

"Twenty-three B, Square Way, London," he said, bracing himself for the spinning sensation that followed.

When the spinning subsided, he saw into the house Sirius and the Potters now called home.

"Sirius Black?" he called out.

A few minutes of calling for someone later, and Sirius walked into the room with a confused look on his face. When he saw Dumbledore, he looked worried and scared.

"Dumbledore! What's going on?"

"Not to worry too much, dear boy. Nothing immediately life threatening."

"So one of their names came out of the Goblet, then?"

"More like all of their names. Er... save for one."

"One? Why would-oh, there's someone new?"

"Yes. If you wouldn't mind coming to Hogwarts, that would be most helpful. I'm rather too old to be making fire-calls for long."

"I'll be there as soon as the fire is available."

"Good," Dumbledore said, pulling his head out of the fire and sending it whirling back to his body in Hogwarts.

Dumbledore stood up, dusted himself off, and walked over to his desk. He was just sitting down when Sirius came out of the fireplace.

"Have a seat, my dear man," Dumbledore offered the usual spot in front of his desk.

"I don't see anyone but you and me, Dumbledore."

"Yes. I sent the new Potter back to his room. If you come back tomorrow, I can show him to you, assuming he's still here. But he was tired, and I wanted to tell you of my experience of him first."

Sirius sat down at last. "Alright, I'm listening."

Dumbledore nodded, and proceeded to explain the entirety of everything from his first meeting with Chandra Rahasyamay to the moment the boy left the room.

"Ah yes, and there was one moment when he answered a question with this tune," Dumbledore said, humming the tune.

Sirius listened to it, then said, "That's 'Give Peace A Chance' by John Lennon."

"Indeed? Then it _was_ an answer, and not just a random tune. Interesting."

"So this boy, you said he speaks in riddles?"

"Metaphors. But since they are metaphors that come from his own unusual mind, I suppose 'riddles' would be just as accurate."

"And he said the others are all in hiding?"

"Yes."

Sirius rubbed his chin.

"Is he going to be able to get into Griffindor tower, speaking only in riddles?"

Dumbledore's expression faltered. "I hadn't considered that. I don't know."

Chandra was lost. He was not bothered by this, though he did wish to sleep. He knew he should have foreseen this; he had been living with Mother so long that he had not had opportunity to pay much attention to the outside world. If he had been capable of thinking of this problem ahead of time, he would have asked for help from the silver grandfather.

There was the sound of a meow behind him, and he turned to see a cat. He was no expert, but it appeared to him that the cat was glaring accusingly at him. It meowed louder, turning its head as though expecting someone specific to arrive. Chandra said nothing; cats were animals, he knew they did not understand English, no matter how clever this one seemed to be. Unless it was an animagus? But he did not think so.

He heard some wheezing, and a rather unpleasant-looking man holding a lantern shuffled into view. Chandra regarded him with passive curiosity.

"Aha! A student out of bed! It's past curfew, what are you up to? No matter, you're in deep trouble now, boy. What's your name, boy? I don't recognize you."

He flinched at the sting of the man's emotions.

"Chandra Rahasyamay," Chandra answered as pleasantly as he could. "And you?"

"Oh, a smart Alec, I see. We'll see where your cheek is when I've got you hanging by your thumbs in the dungeon! Which House are you in, boy?"

Chandra looked puzzled for a moment, then remembered. "The land of the lions, the red and the gold."

"Griffindor? Ha! Doesn't surprise me in the least. Well when Professor McGonagall's done with you, I daresay none of your little friends will be happy with you, and you'll wonder why you thought to break the rules! Now come with me, boy."

"The silver grandfather was speaking with me, then I got tired. Now I am adrift at sea with no stars in the sky. Will you be my north star?"

Filch stared at Chandra, confused until he worked it out. "Oh, claiming to be lost, are you? Like I haven't heard that one a million times, no sirree. I'll help, alright; help you find your way to a whipping if you don't hurry up and follow me, you cheeky little sod."

Chandra grimaced, walking up beside Filch. He tried to take the man's hand in his, causing Filch to gape at him, then hiss like an angry cat.

"What's wrong with you, boy?! Don't touch me! Insubordinate little devil, I'll beat you black and blue if you try that again!"

He nodded, and looked around the corridor, taking in all the sights. He was silent all the way to McGonagall's office, though Filch was muttering the whole way. When they reached the door, Filch knocked on it and waited. Before long, McGonagall opened the door.

"Yes, Filch? What is- what are you doing with mister... sorry, I don't know how to pronounce his name."

"Rahasyamay," said Chandra.

"Yes, what are you doing with Mr. Raha... Rahasyamay? Last I knew, he was in Dumbledore's office. I presume he was sent back to his dorm room in Griffindor."

"He was wandering around, far from anywhere that might be explained by going from Dumbledore's to Griffindor. Claimed to be lost. Up to no good, I reckon. And how come I ain't ever heard of him? I know all the little worms in this god-forsaken school."

"That would be because he's one of the Potter collective, and brand new."

"Figures. Probably trying to find more trouble to get into and not get punished for."

"Never you mind, Filch. Mr. Rahasyamay, why weren't you on the route to bed?"

"I am adrift at sea with no stars in the sky. The angry light-carrier was not the north star I sought."

McGonagall sighed. She wasn't paid enough to deal with one of her students becoming someone who spoke only in riddles.

"Yes, yes. Filch, leave him to me, I'll escort him back to his dorm. I don't know why, but I believe he truly is lost."

"But Professor!"

"No, Filch. Leave it to me. Go back to your patrol, now."

Filch growled and grumbled and muttered to himself, but he left all the same.

"Good. Now he's gone, I'll escort you to Griffindor tower. I'd ask you how you managed to get lost, but I doubt I would understand the answer."

"I am alone. The others sleep underground, too scared to return for now. So I fumble in the dark for a candle."

She blinked at him. "I think I actually understood that."

Chandra smiled at her, and took her hand. She was surprised by this, but allowed it. They held hands all the way back.

'He's left handed,' she thought to herself. 'Odd. The rest of the Potters are right-handed.'

When they got to the portrait of the Fat Lady, the large woman in pink looked surprised to see them.

"Password?"

"Monkshood," said Professor McGonagall, and the portrait opened.

"Do you remember where your room is?" she asked him.

"No."

The common room was full, and full of noise. But everyone stopped when McGonagall and Chandra walked in. Chandra flinched from all the emotions of everyone in the room.

"Professor McGonagall?" someone said, sounding panicked. She rarely ever came into the Griffindor common room.

"No need to sound so worried, I was just escorting Mr. Rahasyamay here. Oh, Ronald Weasley, please come here. Thank you. Mr. Weasley, you know where the Potters sleep, correct?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"It appears the others left Mr. Rahasyamay all alone in there, for the time being. I gather that they are just hiding. But while they're hiding, he cannot navigate the castle. I doubt he knows where any of his classes are, either."

"Er, okay. I'll take him to his room."

"Thank you, Mr. Weasley. Mr. Weasley, this is Chandra Rahasyamay. Mr. Rahasyamay, this is Mr. Ronald Weasley, he is a friend of your collective."

"Yes, I recognize the red knight," Chandra said with a smile.

Ron looked confused. "Red knight?"

"He speaks in riddles, or metaphors. I do not know for sure, but I imagine he calls you that because of your hair, and the fact you played a knight on my giant chess set your first year. Is that correct, Mr. Rahasyamay?"

"Yes."

Ron looked thoughtful. "I like it. Well, this way, Chandra."

Chandra nodded, and followed Ron upstairs to the Potter room.

"Ah, I feel them here," he told Ron. "I feel them in their objects."

"Er, yeah, that's their stuff in there alright."

Chandra nodded, and pulled his robes off. He undid the two wand holsters; he unlocked the compartment of the trunk that had all their clothes in it and put the spare wand in one of the drawers. When he came out again, dressed in nothing but pajama bottoms, he looked quizzically at Ron.

"Thank you, red knight. I need slumber."

"Oh, right. Yes. Sorry. I'll see you in the morning?"

"Most likely," Chandra said.

Ron left, and Chandra lay down in bed, staring at the ceiling for awhile before getting under the covers and going to sleep.

He found himself in the classroom again, and thought for a moment he was back with Mother while someone else was Out. But he soon discovered he was sleeping, dreaming. And the classroom was not as it had been. He was sitting in the front of the classroom, and everyone else was in the back. But they were behind glass, for some reason.

Standing up, Chandra took a closer look at the glass. It was, in fact, a scrying mirror looking into a room with many beds, and the others were all sleeping inside the glass room.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and knew who it was.

"Mother, why do they sleep?"

"Because they are exhausted after the stress they've been through. And you, too, are sleeping."

"They will wake up, though, right?"

"Yes. When they are ready."

He nodded. "What is wrong with me? When I am out there on my own, I mean. I speak strangely. People have a hard time understanding me."

"You've been down here for a long time. Language doesn't come easily to you. It's easier in here, with the others. In this dream, you have their knowledge. Out there, you think differently than most. This will always be true, but when the others return, your communication with other beings will be easier. Just remember that you may have to run your thoughts by the others so they can translate difficult ideas for you."

"How am I to do schoolwork tomorrow without their knowledge?"

"You will adapt."

"But-"

"You _will_ adapt, my child. Trust me on this. Remember your studies. Remember the plan."

He sighed. "Yes, Mother."

"Remember, you have gifts the others do not. If you find something too difficult to do the way the teachers tell you to do it, try it your own way. Blaze your own path. For you know things that no other witch or wizard has known before you. Use that knowledge."

"Yes, Mother."

She lifted Her hand from his shoulder, and the dream dissolved into another, more normal dream.

 _Breakfast:_

Professor McGonagall had decided to keep an eye on the new Potter. If he couldn't even remember how to navigate the school, she didn't think he'd remember any of his classes, and that could be a problem, the Potters being in the fourth year of their magical education.

Rather than alarm more students with her presence, though, she sent Dobby the House Elf – whom the headmaster had hired to the school – to go check on the boy, make sure he could get to classes. She hoped this would turn out to have been a good idea. The small elf had certainly been enthusiastic enough when it was explained to him. She just hoped he wasn't _too_ enthusiastic.

 _Earlier:_

Chandra had woken up because he'd sensed a presence in the room. Specifically, on his bed. He opened his eyes and sat up, and saw before him a small humanoid creature with large, tennis-ball-shaped eyes, a pencil-shaped nose, and giant bat-like ears. It wore an odd assortment of clothes: on its head was a tea cozy, with bright badges pinned to it; a tie patterned with horseshoes over a bare chest, a pair of what looked like children's soccer shorts, and odd socks.

He blinked at the creature. Not knowing what to say, he remained silent.

The creature bowed to Chandra. "Are you Mr. Chandra Rahasyamay Potter, sir? I is Dobby the House Elf, sent by Professor McGonagall to help you at school today."

Chandra continued to stare silently at Dobby. Dobby started to look uncomfortable.

After a minute, Chandra spoke. "Welcome, Small Oddly-Dressed Being."

"Thank you, sir. You can be calling me Dobby, sir, for short."

"Dobby? Dobby. Yes, Dobby. Good. So you are my north star?"

"Um... Dobby is not knowing what you is meaning, sir."

"Sailors upon the ocean navigate by the north star."

"Oh? Yes yes, I is to be sir's guide, helping you around the castle, sir."

"Thank you, kind Dobby," Chandra said. Dobby's eyes watered; this Potter was just as kind as the others he knew.

Chandra got up and went into the bathroom with a towel and new underwear for the day in his hands, and went about his morning routine. When he was all clean and ready to go, he came out and bade Dobby lead him to breakfast.

 _Breakfast:_

Minerva McGonagall's worries were baseless, though, as she found out when Dobby and Chandra came down into the Great Hall for breakfast. Dobby _did_ attract a lot of attention between being a House Elf and his strange clothing, but this was probably for the best, given he was drawing attention away from Chandra.

Well, mostly. As she observed from the teachers' table, she noticed a growing number of girls and a few of the boys staring at the boy in a hungry sort of way. She would have to talk to them later about being discreet, even though Chandra appeared to be oblivious. But she had to admit, he _was_ quite handsome, for a 14 year old boy. He was going to be a heart-breaker when he grew up, with those big brown eyes of his, that strong jawline, and his warm, golden-brown skin.

She watched him carefully look over the breakfast options, ask Dobby some questions, and then pick out several things that he scooped onto his plate with his left hand. She still found that interesting, that he was the only southpaw in the lot of them so far. But more interesting was his diet: fruits, grains, and nuts were all he took from the options available, skipping over anything with meat or other animal products in it. So did this mean he was a vegetarian as well? That was interesting; the other Potters tended to have a great fondness for sausages and other meats.

She heard Dobby speak, but couldn't make out the words. Chandra nodded, and Dobby vanished with a crack of disapparition. She frowned, slightly, wondering what that was about, but a few minutes later, the House Elf was back and telling Chandra something else. She wondered if she ought to pry into that, or leave it alone. After all, in context, it- ah, yes. That was it; he must have asked Dobby to alert the kitchens that he was a vegetarian.

 _Breakfast:_

Chandra followed the little elf through the corridors of Hogwarts, looking every which way as he did, attempting to memorize the route. Dobby tried speaking to him, but he just told the elf "I attempt to fill the emptiness. Please be as a placid lake," and the elf, after looking confused for a moment, had nodded and kept quiet.

When he sat down at the Griffindor table in the Great Hall, he stood in shock at the sight before him. But what his eyes saw wasn't the problem; he had discovered that he could feel imprints of the emotions of the animals much of the food had been. It was subtle, and residual; the others would not have noticed it if they could even detect it. But it was enough to put him off his appetite. But he needed food, and since the plants did not give him the same problem, he went with fruits, grains, and nuts. Milk was not a problem, nor butter, probably because the animal did not die or even get hurt to harvest it. This was a relief, as it expanded his options.

Dobby had noticed this, and had asked him if Dobby should alert the kitchens that he was a vegetarian, to which he had agreed. Anything that would make things easier for him was welcome. This day was starting out not great and getting worse. First he could feel the pain of the food, and now he could feel a large number of minds crowding him, their emotions often focused on him. Some of the sensations were... a bit too pleasant, causing an embarrassing tightness in his pants. Still other emotions burned or whipped him. It was all beginning to give him a headache, so he ate quickly.

On his way out of the Great Hall, Sirius intercepted him.

"Er, uh... are you Chandra Rahasyamay?" Sirius asked him.

Chandra looked at him and smiled, recognizing him. "Black Father!" he hugged the man.

"Oh, so you recognize me? Even with the others hiding?"

"Yes, Black Father."

"Er... I'm not actually black, except in my Animagus form. It's just my surname."

"Ah. You wish another calling? Perhaps Brave Father?"

"Brave Father?"

"Yes. Brave father, of the house of lions. Brave Father, his candle defiant in the darkness of the Evil Place with the soul eaters."

"Ah, yes. Yes, you're right. Brave Father is a good nickname. Shall I call you..." he paused, thinking. "I don't know, I'm not any good at this."

"My calling has meaning. Chandra means Moon, Rahasyamay means Mysterious. You could call me Mysterious Moon."

"I've already got a friend with a moon-based nickname. And it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, either."

Chandra nodded, thinking.

"Anyway," Sirius said, "we can figure it out later. You have classes. Talk with you after dinner?"

"Sunshine in the sky," he said with a smile.

"I... I suppose I'll take that as a 'yes.'"

Stepping out into fresh air was like the lifting of a burden he'd not known he'd been carrying. His feet itched in their socks and shoes, something he'd put on this morning without thinking. But now he wanted to take them off. And Dobby was here, so he did. When they were outside the greenhouses, he took his socks and shoes off and handed them to Dobby.

"Place these by the cloth nest I dream in, please."

The elf looked confused. "But sir is needing his socks and shoes, is he not?"

"As the caged bird cries for freedom, so do my feet."

Dobby nodded with a look of grave understanding on his face. "I understands. I will put them away safely for sir. Just calls for Dobby if you needs anything, sir!"

With that, the elf was gone. Chandra turned around and went into the greenhouses.

Professor Sprout looked at his bare feet and then at his face in confusion before recognizing him from McGonagall's description. She looked at a loss for words.

"Er, Mr. Rahasyamay?" she asked, "are you aware that you're not wearing shoes?"

"Yes."

"And _why_ are you not wearing shoes?"

"They sang to me their desire for freedom."

She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, paused, then said, "Well be careful not to step on anything dangerous."

"Understood, Green Thumb."

The class went reasonably well. Professor Sprout's instructions for the Bouncing Bulbs did not require any previous knowledge to follow. Chandra did worry that his lack of memories would still impair him, but surprisingly, it didn't much... _yet_. He had to pause now and then and get help from Ron or Hermione, but otherwise did pretty well.

Things were slightly tense from the Hufflepuffs. The Potters' names had, after all, come out of the Goblet, but between Al's earlier defense of Cedric Diggory and the oddness of Chandra, they were too off balance to really be angry with him. Ron and Hermione, of course, supported him; they'd seen the lengths Al had taken to try to avoid this tournament, after all.

Care of Magical Creatures was different, of course. Draco Malfoy had been shocked and enraged to see his family's old House Elf, Dobby, guiding Chandra around.

 _"Dobby?"_ shouted Malfoy.

Dobby held up his nose at Malfoy. "Yes, I is Dobby. And you is not my master anymore." He turned back to Chandra. "Later, sir," he said with a bow, and disappeared.

"You stole our old house elf from us! It's bad enough you freed him, now he's yours?!"

"The small elf serves no master. Money is his reward from the silver grandfather, with the fire-bird."

Malfoy looked confused for a moment. "Wait, Dumbledore is _paying_ him to work here?" Malfoy said, in the tone one might use to confirm that someone had _really_ said he was having sex with his own mother.

"Yes."

Their conversation was soon cut short as Hagrid informed them that they were taking the blast-ended skrewts for walks, because they'd started to kill each other. Malfoy, of course, was quite vocal against this idea. But Chandra was looking at his own skrewt with a horrified expression on his face, backing away slowly.

"Wha's the matter? Er... sorry, don't know yer name."

"His name is Chandra," Hermione said, once it was clear Chandra wasn't going to answer.

"Wha's wrong, Chandra?"

Chandra pointed at the skrewt, in horror.

"W-what did you _do_? _What did you do?_ "

Hagrid looked very nervous. "Dunno whatcha mean. Evryone back ter leashin up yer skrewts, there's good kids. Go on, they need their exercise."

Chandra began to cry silently, tears streaming down his face as he continued to stare at the hideous monsters. His whole body shook.

"If yer scared of em, yeh can take the day off, I won't mind," Hagrid said.

" _ABOMINATION_!" Chandra screamed, pointing at the skrewt. "PAIN! CONFUSION! RAGE! _WHAT DID YOU DO?_ _ **HOW**_ DID YOU DO IT? _**WHY**_ **did you do it?** "

"Calm down there, alrigh? No need ter shout about it. Sorry, evryone, he's just in a bit of a state. Better get 'im a calming draught."

Chandra's brain was going at high speed, trying to find the right image, the right words, to express his feelings, to express the truth of the skrewts. He couldn't, at first, find anything that fit, that was even _close_ to what he needed to say.

"They howl in mental agony! They rage in confusion against themselves! Blind creatures; two beings, afraid and angry in the darkness! Two creatures trapped in one body, fighting in the darkness! Cornered animals, all their lives, with no escape! Every moment they live is Hell! It's... IT SHOULD NOT BE!"

Several people had tied their skrewts to a tree, to come closer, the better to see Chandra's freak-out; even Ron and Hermione did this.

"What's the matter?" Hermione asked.

"Fire-crab fights manticore, manticore fights fire-crab! They fight each other, it fights ITSELF! That thing _SHOULD NOT EXIST!_ "

As Chandra screamed those words at the top of his voice, pointing at the skrewt, there was a flash of golden light from Chandra's finger, a whooshing sound, and the skrewt fell to the ground, dead. But this did not change Chandra's mood. He whirled around, looking at the other skrewts, and got out his wand.

"What did yeh do? It's dead! You k-killed it!" Hagrid looked like he was about to cry.

"Its fighting ceases. Its Hell is ended. Its two beings have woken from their nightmare. Better the peace of death than the endless nighmarish Hell you forced them into! Their creation, your crime, heinous despite your ignorance. But for that ignorance, Mother would smite you, were She not so merciful."

He started shooting golden light at another skrewt, and Hagrid bounded forward to stop him.

"NO! DON'T HURT EM!"

"THEY HURT JUST BY _BEING_! I am ending their agony!"

She didn't know if it was a trick of the light or what, but for a moment Hermione thought Chandra's eyes had changed color to blue, then to green, then to purple, before going back to their normal brown. And as it happened, a freak wind came out of the calm sky and blew Hagrid over onto his back, then started rolling him along the ground.

Chandra looked surprised, but took advantage of this odd occurrence to shoot golden light – which Hermione realized now was being cast non-verbally – at the other skrewts, until they were all dead. At least, she _hoped_ Hagrid didn't have any more of the foul things hidden away somewhere.

Ron and Hermione spent the rest of the class consoling Hagrid on his loss, even though they privately agreed with Chandra for killing the foul creatures. Everyone else had left, certain that Hagrid wouldn't be able to continue for the rest of the day, if not longer.

Chandra came over to the large man, keeping his distance in case Hagrid attacked him.

"I am sorry, Tall Father. I know you loved them. If you had seen and felt what I did, your love for them would have had you at my side in this action. They were in great pain. They should never have existed. Fire crabs and manticores were not meant to mix. Do not do it again, I beg you. I would not want to hurt you a second time. But what I did today, I would do again, for it was Right." He paused, then continued, "Please do not treat the others differently for what I have done; they are not here, they are hiding. They will not know what I've done until they return."

Just then, Professor McGonagall and Professor Dumbledore came running into the area, looking very anxious.

"What's going on?" McGonagall demanded. "The wards said there was someone using Killing Curses out here!"

"Tall Father created abominations. They were in agony, fighting themselves in endless internal battle. I could not bear their pain, so I unmade them. They should never have been made to begin with, so I unmade them."

" _You_ were casting those Killing Curses?" she said, bewildered.

"But that _couldn't_ have been a Killing Curse!" complained Hermione. "I mean yes, it did kill them, and there was that whooshing sound from the time Professor Moody showed us the Killing Curse, but the Killing Curse is _green_ , and the light coming from Chandra's wand was golden!"

"Can you corroborate that, Mr. Weasley?"

"Yeah, it was golden. Like, bright gold. But otherwise it acted the same and sounded the same as the... as the Killing Curse."

Chandra stared at his wand, examining it as though he'd never seen one before. "Yes, I did as they speak. And I am unsure how. I do not know the words to the spell. All I know is they were in such pain and terror that they needed release, so I fed that need into the wand, and it released them."

"Most astonishing," Dumbledore said. He then nudged one of the skrewts with his toe. "Are these the creatures you killed?"

"Yes, Silver Grandfather."

"I see. Hagrid, I know you're very upset right now, but Mr. Rahasyamay has a point. You really should not have engaged in illegal breeding experiments. Please do not do it again."

"R-r-right, Professor," Hagrid choked out between sobs.

"Again, Tall Father, I am sorry to hurt you. But I had to."

Chandra then turned to Dumbledore. "If I am to be punished, then so be it."

"I shall leave Professor McGonagall to comforting Hagrid, then. Mr. Weasley, Miss Granger, please go back up to the castle. Mr. Rahasyamay will join you later."

They nodded and left. Professor Dumbledore said, "Come," to Chandra, and led him to his office, where they'd just been last night. They didn't speak until after they were both sitting down.

"Mr. Rahasyamay, before we get to the matter of your punishment, would you please tell me what you were feeling when you cast that curse?"

He pondered a moment, then said, "Sadness, mostly. Horror, yes, but sadness. Those poor creatures were in such agony. Their being was a crime against Life, and against them. They were begging for release from their agony and their terror."

"I see. Tell me, would it be accurate to say you felt love for these creatures? In the sense that their pain hurt you because the pain and suffering of life-forms in general hurts you because you love Life?"

"Yes, that does sound true."

"A Killing Curse powered by love rather than hate? Fascinating. Still, no matter its power source, it was registered as a Killing Curse by the wards. You used a curse that could have killed a student or teacher and landed you in Azkaban for life if you had miscalculated your aim. I don't know what punishment fits that crime, to be honest. I think I'll start with a week's worth of detentions, though, and 50 points from Griffindor."

Chandra nodded. "Understood."

"And if you ever use an Unforgivable again, no matter _what_ you're aiming at, I'm afraid I shall have to expel you. Our leniency only goes so far. I won't expel you this time because you were clearly emotionally distraught by those creatures, and you are... new. So some allowances must be made. But as I said, the points I took from Griffindor, and a week's detentions. You'll come to my office at 6 o'clock sharp tonight, understood?"

"Er... But Brave Father, who is also a black dog, wished to speak with me after dinner today."

There was a pause as Dumbledore worked out his meaning, before he said, "Your godfather will just have to speak with you another time. Detentions come first. He will understand, he had plenty of them in his days at Hogwarts."

"I understand. Six of the clock, here."

"Good. Then you may go now."

After a lunch consisting mostly of steamed vegetables and some cheese, Chandra went on to Divination, still with bare feet. On his way up, though, he got stopped by Filch.

"What's this now? Why don't you have any shoes on, you little worm?"

"They needed to be free. So I let them be free."

"Where's your shoes at, then?"

"Dobby took them to my room for me."

"Dobby? Who's Dobby?"

"Dobby is a house elf."

"Oh yes, the new house elf. The _weird_ one. Well call him back and tell him to bring you your shoes! And god help you if you tracked any mud into my clean castle on your filthy soles!"

Chandra checked the bottoms of his feet. "They appear clean."

"I doubt that they started out that way; you've probably tracked in mud somewhere, and now I have to go hunting for it. But I've had enough of you for now. Don't let me catch you going barefoot again!"

Chandra nodded. Filch stayed behind to make sure Chandra called Dobby and got his socks and shoes back on. Then he left.

Far from being angry with the man, Chandra was relieved. He hadn't thought to call Dobby again, after all the commotion earlier. But he would have gotten lost if he had forgotten.

"Be my north star again, Dobby? I need to find the seer's classroom."

"Right away, sir! Follow Dobby, sir!"

To his surprise, Chandra remembered Professor Trelawney. Apparently she'd left such a powerful impression on the others that the memory persisted even with them all hiding. So when he first saw her, and remembered what she was like, he took out his drawing materials and went to work. But where he'd used two pens and a lot of dots to make his art before, this time he was just using a pencil and drawing like normal.

The professor didn't care for this, of course. She kept looking his way, clearly annoyed to be disrespected by yet another Potter.

"Hello there, young man. What is your name?"

Without looking up from his drawing, he said, "If a man tells you he is blind, check to make sure he is not simply closing his eyes."

This drew laughter from some of the other students, which she shushed with an angry glare. Then she turned back to Chandra.

"The Sight is not always clear on little details such as names, you should know. So with that in mind, young man, what is your name?"

"Chandra Rahasyamay."

"Good, good. Now if-"

Dropping his pencil, he grabbed her arm and stared up at her with a sorrowful expression, almost pitying. She stared back at him, speechless, and his look of sorrow intensified as he shook his head, making sad clucking noises with his tongue, then sighed heavily, and let one tear roll down his cheek.

"Do not let the toad cow you, in the school year to come. She will make your life miserable in a way Alastair never could. You must be strong." He stood up and whispered in her ear, "Sherry is not a strength potion, it is a weakness potion. Resist its siren song. Dumbledore will protect you, if you but remain strong."

And in the next instant, he sat back down and went back to his drawing as though nothing interesting had happened.

She was stunned speechless, and stared at him for almost a full minute before wandering off like a tired toddler over to her usual seat, holding onto it for support. After a few minutes, she finally got back, with difficulty, to the business of teaching class. She did not speak to Chandra Rahasyamay again that day.

After dinner, Chandra went to the headmaster's office as instructed. Or rather, he went to where the gargoyle was. He pulled his drawing from the night before out of the storage container embedded in the portable desk strapped to his chest that he had manifested the night before, and looked at it, then put it back. Once it was secure, he gave the gargoyle the password and went up to Dumbledore's office.

When he knocked on the door, Dumbledore told him to come in.

"Mr. Rahasyamay, I was not expecting you to remember the password. I was about to meet you down there."

"Lead or follow, Silver Grandfather?"

"I shall follow you down, then lead you to where your detention is to be served."

Chandra nodded, and they made their way down and out from behind the gargoyles. Then Dumbledore led him to Professor Snape's office.

"I do hate to do this to you, but you did quite a serious thing, so you will be taking your detentions with Professor Snape."

"Understood. But I do not understand why you are sorry for it."

"Do you not remember Professor Snape?"

He shook his head.

"Maybe you will when you see him."

Dumbledore knocked on Snape's office door, and it opened at once, Snape glaring out. His face relaxed a little when he saw Dumbledore, then he grimaced and glared down at Chandra.

"So this is the new Potter you spoke of?"

"Yes, Severus. His name is Chandra Rahasyamay. He, er... is a little hard to understand at times, his manner of speaking is somewhat unusual."

"So I have heard. No matter, he will not be speaking much. I will have him scrubbing out cauldrons without magic."

"Good. Just do not torment the boy unduly."

"I want as little to do with him as possible, I assure you, headmaster."

"Good. I shall see you later, then."

Dumbledore turned away and left. Snape gestured for Chandra to follow him, and he led the boy to another room full of filthy, stinking cauldrons.

"Well, what are you waiting for? Get in here now."

"Yes, sir." _Angry Vulture Man,_ he thought but did not say aloud. The man still glared at him as though he had heard anyway.

"These cauldrons have been brewing particularly nasty failed potions in them. You will scrub out these cauldrons until they are all spotless, without using magic. When they are clean, I will inspect them, and give you something else to do, if time has not already expired. You will not speak except to tell me you are done with the task I have assigned you. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Here are some dragon-hide gloves, some scrubbers, and cleaning solution. Now get to work."

Snape sat down at his desk, grading papers, and Chandra set to work.

It did not take Chandra long to realize that the job was actually pretty easy, insofar as he could do it on automatic and let his mind wander as he did. This was not so bad a price to pay for doing the right thing, in his view. Snape could have been really evil and assigned him to kill some poor creature for potions ingredients, which would have been quite impossible for him to do. Perhaps Snape had already heard enough about him to guess this, and didn't want the stress of fighting with him to try to get him to violate his principles.

But thinking became tedious after a while, so he just went into a meditative state as he worked, humming a little tune. If Snape could hear the tune, he gave no sign.

This went quite well for several minutes before it went a little wrong. He was partway into the third cauldron, humming along, when the air suddenly began to smell of lavender, and the cauldron cleaned itself completely, all on its own. Chandra stopped and blinked at this. He knew he had done accidental magic, and he knew Snape would not be happy.

Alerted by the sudden silence, Snape looked up at him.

"What is it? Why have you stopped?"

"Um... sir? I..."

"What did you do?" Snape snapped at him, standing up to come see what was going on.

Snape stared into the cauldron. "I thought I told you _no magic!_ "

"It was accidental! I was humming, my mind blank, and it just... happened."

Snape sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I see." He paused to collect himself before speaking again. "Well, Mr. Rahasyamay, no more humming in that case. And, while I understand it will be difficult for you to do this, please try to not let your mind go blank. If it happens again, I shall find something more difficult for you to do."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Now get back to work," Snape demanded, sitting back down again.

Without humming, and with trying to force his mind to think about something other than going blank, Chandra went back to work. And between the lack of distractions and having to focus on keeping his mind occupied, the task became much more difficult. Much more like punishment. But at least he didn't provoke Snape's ire again that night.

Tired from his cleaning, Chandra returned to his room at 11 PM and found that Hedwig had a letter for him from Sirius.

 _Dear Chandra,_

 _If you don't mind waking up an hour earlier, we can meet before breakfast tomorrow, since you've got detentions for a week, according to Dumbledore. You can tell me what happened if you want._

 _Looking forward to seeing you._

 _Love,_

 _Sirius_

Chandra smiled, and wrote a quick letter back to him agreeing to the meeting. It would mean less sleep than he usually got, but he could manage it at least once. So with that to look forward to, he sent Hedwig back with the reply, stripped out of all his clothes save his underwear, and curled into bed.

 **End note one:** Some of Chandra's difficulties in classes during this chapter are inspired a little bit by an experience our own collective had some years ago. We used to work at an inbound customer service call center, and Alex was the only one of us any good at it. One day something upset him so badly that he vanished for a week, and we spent the whole week trying to make up for him being gone. It took all the rest of us working in concert to do a fourth as good a job as he did, calls took 3 or 4 times longer to complete, and it took so much parallel processing power for the brain to do that every night after work we spent hours recovering from the exhaustion, where Alex had never been more than mildly tired after work. We were very grateful when Alex came back. Alex didn't remember anything that happened to him down there, or if there was anything to remember. It was like waking up and not remembering whether or not you dreamed.

Also, yes, I skipped Chandra and Sirius talking before breakfast. They didn't talk about much of any importance.

 **End note two:** I've been planning Chandra Rahasyamay for a long time. He was inspired by an idea a reader sent me, I forget who. I've had a lot of ideas about him, but I have to say that the way I write my characters, they basically write themselves. I come up with ideas about them, and something in my mind points out what to keep and what to throw out, and then sometimes comes up with its own stuff that it doesn't tell me about until I'm actually writing the scenes. Chandra was one such character; when I started writing this chapter, what came out surprised me as much as it probably surprised you. It made sense, and it still does. If it hadn't, I would have scrapped it and tried again.

Something else I have to say about Chandra: I have no bloody clue why he is the way he is. I know the in-story reasons why he is, but I don't know where he came from in my mind. I don't think I've ever read about or written of a character remotely like him before. Getting into his headspace to write him is surreal. And getting back out of his headspace after putting the story away, or stepping away, is difficult. It's not a new sensation, this headspace inertia, but thinking like Chandra is definitely a unique and bizarre experience for me.

Honestly, I don't really want anyone else in my head with me, but I wouldn't mind someone like Chandra moving in.

Also, I hadn't planned the scene with the skrewts. It just came to me when I got to that part.

One last thing re: the skrewts = "Big bwuhthuh?" *evil grin*


	27. Reluctant Returns

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 27"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-seven:** **Reluctant Returns**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}.__ _And now_ _ _~Chandra.~__

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

Classes were a bit of a mixed bag for Chandra. In History of Magic, he got out his two colored pens and went back to drawing with dots, all during class. Professor Lupin was mildly annoyed by this, but when he called on Chandra in class, Chandra was always able to repeat anything Lupin had said verbatim without looking up from his drawing, but always paused his work during these times, going back to it the moment Lupin or someone else started to talk again. But, as Lupin soon found out, Chandra had no memory of anything they'd discussed when any of the others in his collective had been present instead of him. So clearly the problem wasn't with his memory, except that the others had apparently taken their memories with them when they hid.

Potions was much worse. Snape insisted Chandra put his art away. For some reason, despite appearing to pay attention, Chandra could no longer remember what Snape was saying, but did not appear to be doing it on purpose. In fact, it made him very upset. He kept apologizing, voice cracking with emotion, and kept looking back at his art closed up in its case. Snape finally got too upset with him to continue, and decided to ignore Chandra for the rest of class.

When making potions that were in their books, Chandra did adequately well, but not spectacularly. At least he didn't blow anything up or ruin the potions. But clearly he was frustrated by this.

"Stupid Angry Vulture Man," he complained after Potions. "Too fond of looming and being angry to _see_."

"See what, Chandra?" asked Hermione.

"He stopped my memory. He did not see. I need my memory."

"Er... what?" Ron asked.

Chandra took his drawing paper out and showed them the piece he'd begun in Potions. "Memory. I need my memory. The meat remembers, but the memory remembers so much better."

"What are you on about?"

Hermione gasped in sudden realization. "Wait, Chandra... are you saying you're taking notes? That this pointilism art of yours is some kind of code?"

"It is the memory. The red-red-blue is the dot-dot-dash."

"Hermione, _what_ is he talking about?"

"These pictures of his, he's writing in Morse Code."

"What's Morse Code?"

"One of the earliest electronic communication methods the Muggles came up with was the telegraph, and it could only transmit dots and dashes, so Samuel Morse came up with a code of these dots and dashes to represent different letters and numbers, so messages could be sent. The most famous of these is SOS. Anyway, Chandra's adapted Morse Code to take notes with. Red dots represent the Morse dots, and the blue dots represent dashes."

"He's drawing with _words_ , you mean?"

"Yes. It's ingenious, actually. Look like you're just drawing, and actually you're taking notes."

"The memory, yes. Dot-dot-dash for every word spoken. But Angry Vulture Man wouldn't let me do it. I need the memory to do well in class."

"Well just explain to him that you're taking notes, he should understand. He may not like it, but he can't stop you taking notes in class."

"What he can, he will, if it serves his anger. But I shall explain tonight."

Explaining himself to Snape after dinner, about 'the memory,' might have taken hours if he hadn't had Hermione's words written down to explain. Snape finally understood, and snappishly said he could take his 'bloody notes' in class using his 'ridiculously complicated Muggle code' if he wanted, using a tone of voice that suggested he just wanted to stop having to tolerate the conversation, and told Chandra to leave his sight.

Charms was something different again for Chandra. He could, thanks to his art, repeat verbatim anything Professor Flitwick said, but he couldn't perform any of the charms. Having heard that Chandra didn't have many memories from before Sunday, Flitwick had him try a simple first-year charm instead, explaining some preliminary things to him first. And Hermione, who had thought ahead, shared her notes from first-year with him. But even with all that help, Chandra couldn't do even the simplest of charms.

He was utterly hopeless at Transfiguration, too, as it turned out. Since he couldn't remember anything about the class, he again got put on remedial lessons, and couldn't do the simplest transfiguration. It was indeed like he'd been reset to his first week of Hogwarts, even though he was 14. This was a fact that Draco Malfoy soon picked up on through the grapevine, and made every attempt to tease Chandra about it. Chandra mostly ignored Malfoy, even when he was saying that Chandra was going to die in the first Task because he was a dunce. Chandra found it very difficult to not cry or punch Malfoy in the nose, or both.

But the worst yet, in some ways, was Defense Against the Dark Arts. Moody decided to try Chandra on the Imperius Curse again, because he was new, and without the others he was as vulnerable as anyone. It was quite embarrassing.

It didn't help that most of the school was shunning him. The Hufflepuffs were of two minds about him still, and the Griffindors were glad to have a Griffindor champion, but the Ravenclaws and Slytherins were all convinced that they'd put their own names in, despite Chandra appearing when the others vanished. For one, most of them thought he was a metamorphmagus who was pretending to be multiple people for attention, and they also hadn't seen the lengths Al had gone to in his attempts to avoid being put into the Tournament. And of course, they thought he was faking his troubles in class for more attention. Only Ron and Hermione and Luna believed him, out of all the students.

And of course, Hagrid wasn't talking to him, not even in class. Hagrid hadn't gone back to flobberworms, thank goodness, and had instead gone with regular magical creatures like knarls and crups, because his heart wasn't up to more monsters. Still, in classes Hagrid always regarded Chandra warily, like he expected even these ordinary magical creatures to be struck down by Chandra's magic.

A magic that Chandra didn't even know how to recreate, in point of fact. Aside from once scouring out a dirty cauldron with accidental magic, he hadn't done any magic since killing the skrewts, and he couldn't figure out why not. If he'd not been able to do any magic at all since appearing, it wouldn't have bothered him much, given his missing memories. But he'd done a kind of magic nobody had done before, a Killing Curse fueled by love rather than hate, without even knowing the words to the curse. His frustration grew every day that he couldn't get a single spell to work. He even began praying, at night, to Mother, hoping She could hear him. Except that he _knew_ _for a fact_ She could hear him; what he really wanted was for Her to answer him back. He remembered the dream he'd had, of course, but nothing She'd said had made any sense to him.

Then on his second Friday, he started seeing people wearing strange buttons that he couldn't read at first, they were too far distant. It was little more than a curiosity, though, until the corridor before Potions. When he first saw them a little closer on the Slytherins, he thought they were pins for the House-Elf Liberation Front that Hermione had made, but then he got close enough to read them. They all bore the same message, in luminous red letters that burnt brightly in the dimly lit underground passage:

Support CEDRIC DIGGORY —

The REAL Hogwarts Champion

"Like them, Potter?" said Malfoy loudly as Chandra approached. "And this isn't all they do — look!"

He pressed his badge into his chest, and the message upon it vanished, to be replaced by another one, which glowed green:

POTTER STINKS

The Slytherins howled with laughter. Each of them pressed their badges too, until the message _POTTER STINKS_ was shining brightly all around Chandra. He felt the heat rise in his face and neck.

"My name is Chandra Rahasyamay."

Draco parroted these words back at him in a mocking tone.

"Oh _very_ funny," Hermione said sarcastically to Pansy Parkinson and her gang of Slytherin girls, who were laughing harder than anyone, "really _witty._ "

"Want one, Granger?" said Malfoy, holding out a badge to Hermione. "I've got loads. But don't touch my hand, now. I've just washed it, you see; don't want a Mudblood sliming it up."

Chandra's anger from the past week and a half bubbled over, and he turned calmly to Malfoy, pointing his wand at the blond boy, and said, "It fights itself in agony."

Malfoy went even paler than usual, and ducked away.

"You threatened me! You threatened to kill me! He was going to kill me, like he did to those skrewts! You all saw it!"

Chandra sheathed his wand and grinned.

"Like anybody's going to take that seriously, Malfoy," Hermione said. "Chandra doesn't even know how he did it to begin with, and he hasn't done any magic since then. It was an empty threat."

"And that spell was fueled by love. Recreating it would require I love you, Silver Ferret, which I do not. Nor do I hate you. You inspire naught but indifference."

The class was divided. The Slytherins all took Malfoy's side of course, but most of the Griffindors thought Malfoy was being an idiot, that Hermione was right. Even the ones who thought he was faking being a multiple believed that he didn't know how to make gold Killing Curses, that it had been something he'd done accidentally while upset.

Draco pulled out his own wand and brandished it at Chandra. Reacting on instinct, Chandra took his wand back out and backed up, wary of what Malfoy would do, and a little panicky, seeing as he couldn't think of a single spell he knew how to do. He weighed that against what Malfoy could do, or tried to. But without any memory of Malfoy's capabilities, he didn't know what the safest thing to do was.

 _ **Why that little turd,**_ said a voice in his head, startling him. But then he felt the presence that came with it, and it felt like it was waking up from a very long nap.

~ _Alastair?~_ he thought.

 _ **The very same. I think it's just you and me at the moment.**_

But since Chandra could now feel the memories flooding back, he didn't mind that at all. Al took control of the right arm and took the wand from Chandra's left. Nobody else seemed to notice this.

" _Densaugeo_!" screamed Malfoy.

" _Protego_!" Al yelled with Chandra's voice.

The spell hit his shield and dissipated.

"Ha!" Al laughed in Chandra's voice. "Whadda ya think of _that_ , you little wankstain?"

"He used his right hand! And that _voice_! Al's back!" Hermione shouted, clapping. Ron cheered.

"What is all this shouting about?" asked the cold, deadly-sounding voice of Snape.

"This little coward just tried hexing Chandra, who was essentially helpless, but I arrived right in the nick of time to save him," Al explained, still in Chandra's voice and body.

Snape stared at Chandra as though the boy had mutated into a horklump before his eyes. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Snape sighed.

"I don't get paid enough to put up with nonsense like this," he muttered, audibly. "Fine then, Mr. Rahasyamay or whoever you are, 20 points apiece from Griffindor and Slytherin for doing magic in the corridors. Now I suggest everyone come in to class before I make it thirty!"

Snape whirled around and stalked into his classroom ahead of everyone else, ignoring the confused chatter of the students at Snape's uncharacteristic taking of points from his own house. Al let Chandra have the body back, and they went into class with everyone else.

 _ **Snape must be off his game if he didn't give any detentions**_ , Al said.

 _~Silver Grandfather bade The Angry Vulture Man punish me for releasing the Conflicted Ones. Many nights this past week he has had to watch me fight the stains of his students' mistakes.~_

 _ **Uh... what now?**_

A series of feelings and images flashed to Al from Chandra. Al was still puzzled, so he checked to see if the common memory had updates from Chandra. It did.

 _ **Ah, I see. I think.**_

 _~My point was that he sees me more than he likes as is.~_

 _ **Ah yes, that makes sense.**_

The rest of the class, Snape lectured about antidotes, and Chandra dutifully took notes. Since only Ron, Hermione, and Snape knew this was what he was doing, others kept looking back and forth between him and Snape, as though wondering why Snape wasn't blowing up at Chandra.

While Chandra took notes, Al reviewed the memories from when Chandra had been alone, and chuckled, growled, or groaned on occasion so only Chandra could hear him.

Then a knock at the door interrupted their thoughts.

It was Colin Creevey, who edged into the room and looked around until he spotted Chandra. He half-grinned; he and Chandra hadn't really met, so he didn't know Chandra except by sight. Colin walked up to Snape's desk at the front of the room.

"Yes?" said Snape curtly.

"Please, sir, I'm supposed to take, er... 'Chandra Rasamy or whichever of the Potters is available' upstairs, sir."

"It is pronounced 'Rahasyamay,' I believe. And we are in the middle of class, Mr. Creevey. Surely it can wait?"

Colin went pink.

"Sir — sir, Mr. Bagman wants him," he said nervously. "All the champions have got to go, I think they want to take photographs."

 _ **Lovely,**_ Al said sarcastically. _**Just bloody great. Well, if it gets us out of class early...**_

"Very well, very well," Snape snapped. "Potter, leave your things here, I want you back down here later to test your antidote."

"Please, sir — he's got to take his things with him," squeaked Colin. "All the champions —"

"Very _well_!" said Snape. "Potter — take your bag and get out of my sight!"

Chandra stood up, putting on his bookbag and transferring his artwork to his portable desk thing, ignoring the 'Potter Stinks' badges flashing as he went by. Al imagined giving them all a pair of very rude hand gestures.

Following behind Colin, Al took his wand out of its holster and started twirling it like a baton. Chandra, meanwhile, was drawing with the left hand.

"Er, hello, my name is Colin Creevey," Colin said when they were out in the corridor. "Are you Chandra Rasmay?"

"Chandra Rahasyamay," said Chandra.

"Er, that. Are you?"

"Yes."

"It's amazing, isn't it? You being the Champion, I mean."

"A diamond of accuracy lies rough in the stone of that statement," Chandra said.

"Um, okay."

"What do they want photos for, Colin?" Al asked with Chandra's voice.

"The _Daily Prophet,_ I think!"

"Lovely, just what we need, more publicity."

Colin frowned thoughtfully at him. "Your voice sounds different. I mean, it's the same voice, but the tone is different."

Al held out Chandra's hand, to Chandra's annoyance. "Hi. Alastair Potter riding shotgun in the body at the moment. The others are all in hiding."

"Even Har—er, I mean Adira?"

"Yes, even Adira."

"You can talk and move the body even when you're not transformed?"

"Yes. It's harder. Usually, I mean. Chandra doesn't resist as much as the others do."

"Cool. Well good luck!"

They had reached the right room. Al nodded at Colin and knocked, before giving Chandra back control of the body, right hand excepted, as he was twirling his wand again.

 _ **I rather suspect this will be more fun watching you do all the talking.**_

 _~As it pleases you, Angry Defender.~_

 _ **Angry Defender? Why do I get a name similar to both Snape's and Filch's?**_

 __ _~Do you find the calling inaccurate?~_

 _ **That's not the bloody point!**_

 _~As you wish, Sarcastic Defender.~_

 _ **Better. Thanks.**_

Chandra entered a fairly small classroom; most of the desks had been pushed away to the back of the room, leaving a large space in the middle; three of them, however, had been placed end-to-end in front of the blackboard and covered with a long length of velvet. Five chairs had been set behind the velvet-covered desks, and Ludo Bagman was sitting in one of them, talking to a witch neither he nor Al recognized, who was wearing magenta robes.

Viktor Krum was standing moodily in a corner as usual and not talking to anybody. Cedric and Fleur – a girl Al only knew the name of because Chandra did – were in conversation. Fleur looked a good deal happier than Chandra had seen her so far; she kept throwing back her head so that her long silvery hair caught the light. A paunchy man, holding a large black camera that was smoking slightly, was watching Fleur out of the corner of his eye.

 _ **Creepy man,**_ Al thought. Chandra did not reply.

Bagman finally noticed Chandra, and blinked for a moment in confusion before recognizing him from the night of Halloween.

"Harry Potter!" Bagman said jubilantly.

Chandra looked up at the man in annoyance.

"My calling is Chandra Rahasyamay. There is no longer a 'Harry Potter' in existence anymore. The one whose calling was once that is now Adira Potter."

"Er, yes, sorry about that. Not as young as I used to be, after all."

"That is ever true of all of us, all the time. Your excuse is hollow, and will not be permitted again."

"Er, sorry again. Meant no offense."

"Stab a man in the foot by mistake, and you have still wounded him."

"I don't know what to do beyond apologize. So again, I'm sorry."

"It is heard. Just remember, do not re-offend."

"Ah, yes. Agreed. Well anyway, nothing to worry about, it's just the wand weighing ceremony, the rest of the judges will be here in a moment."

"Wand weighing ceremony?" Al asked for Chandra.

"We have to check that your wands are fully functional, no problems, you know, as they're your most important tools in the tasks ahead," said Bagman. "The expert's upstairs now with Dumbledore. And then there's going to be a little photo shoot. This is Rita Skeeter," he added, gesturing toward the witch in magenta robes. "She's doing a small piece on the tournament for the _Daily Prophet_."

"Maybe not _that_ small, Ludo," said Rita Skeeter, her eyes on Chandra.

Her hair was set in elaborate and curiously rigid curls that contrasted oddly with her heavy-jawed face. She wore jeweled spectacles. The thick fingers clutching her crocodile-skin handbag ended in two-inch nails, painted crimson.

"I wonder if I could have a little word with Harry before we start?" she said to Bagman, but still gazing fixedly at Chandra. "The youngest champion, you know … to add a bit of color?"

"He assures me his name is Chandra Rahasyamay. You do know, don't you, that Potter is, well, many people in one body? At least that's what I've heard."

"The large yellow man is correct. There is no Harry Potter. The one once named Harry is now Adira, and she is still hiding. It is just myself and Alastair Potter at the moment."

"Lovely," she said, grabbing Chandra's robes and trying to drag him toward another door.

Al took control of the body at that moment and growled at the woman.

"Hands off, you horrible woman! Leave us alone."

"Oh, is this the rumored Alixer I've heard so much about?"

"Alastair. My name is Alastair. For crying out loud, woman, it's basically the same first name as Moody's!"

"Yes yes, so you say." She unsnapped a crocodile-skin handbag and from it took a roll of parchment and an acid-green quill out, sucking on the end before setting it down on the parchment.

"And do you mind if I give a quick interview, Allstar?"

"Since you can't even get any of our names right, that is emphatically NO."

"Oh come now, Aster, surely it wouldn't hurt-"

Al flipped his wand out of its holster at a command and used his wand to set her parchment and quill on fire. She shrieked at this and leapt back. From behind him, Al heard Viktor Krum chuckling.

"YOU FOUL LITTLE MUTANT!" she screamed at him. "I WILL TAKE YOU TO SMALL CLAIMS COURT AND YOU WILL PAY FOR A REPLACEMENT QUILL-"

" _Silencio_ ," Al said, and her voice disappeared.

 _Really_ angry now, she leapt at him.

" _Impedimenta,_ " he said, and she was pushed against the wall, pinned there to shriek noiselessly and futilely.

Krum's chuckle was a full-throated guffaw now. Fleur was making some comment to show her disapproval. Cedric looked torn between laughing and chiding.

"Mr. Bagman, will you please escort this small and annoying insect out of the room?"

Oddly, Rita Skeeter stopped moving and trying to shriek, and turned pale. He raised one of Chandra's eyebrows at her quizzically.

"Yes, of course, Mr. Rassmay," Bagman said, flubbing the name. "Bozo can stay, of course, but you're being quite disruptive, Ms. Skeeter."

The fight gone out of her, she left willingly, looking back at Al/Chandra with deep worry and suspicion.

Dumbledore and Mr. Ollivander came in after that, and Ollivander examined all of their wands in turn, made them do some simple magic, then returned them to their owners, satisfied they were working properly. He did not mention the origin of the holly wand, though Al was briefly worried he would. Nor did he test their spare wand, though Al knew he knew it was there.

When the ceremony was done, the photographer took pictures. Skeeter – who had come back – tried to make Chandra out to be more important than the others, but Al glared at her with Chandra's face, making her back off. But other than small things like that, Al let Chandra keep running the body. It was entertaining, a bit like having Luna Lovegood in the collective, but different. This thought made him imagine Chandra and Luna meeting one another, and that amused him even more.

Getting the pictures taken, when Madame Maxime was so large, was not easy. But they eventually got it done, and Dumbledore dismissed them off to dinner. But they hadn't even gotten to the door when Krum, of all people, came up to Chandra.

"I vas vatching you speak with that Skeeter woman. It vas most entertaining. But I do not know how vise that vas, antagonizing somevun like her."

"Yes, but Alastair recognized her name. She rarely has a kind word for anyone. Perhaps Alastair should not have antagonized the Buzzing Insect, but her nibbles are nearly as painful as her stings, so it is of no moment."

"Vy do you call her Buzzing Insect?"

"The surname Skeeter is too apt, she is like a buzzing insect which draws blood. While I doubt the veracity of astrology, I must wonder why nomancy is not more popular in this wizarding world."

"Vat?"

"Nomancy, divination by names. Names do appear to have an odd power in the wizarding world. Sirius Black, for one. Like his name, he is a black dog star. Remus Lupin is a werewolf, and his name means Wolf Wolf. Professor Septima Vector teaches wizarding maths, and her name is a maths pun. The Malfoys have faith in a bad ideology, and their name means 'bad faith.' Perhaps Tom Riddle noticed this trend as well? It would explain why his chosen calling is a bad French pun."

"Who is Tom Riddle?" Krum asked.

"He is the one more commonly called Voldemort."

"Ah yes, I see vat you mean."

"Indeed." Then he snorted. "And of course the Riddle was a riddle, and still is."

"Vell, I must say I like you, Chandra. May I sit next to you at dinner to continue our conversation?"

"Yes. Just be aware my friend Ron will be star-struck by you."

"I am somevat used to this. I vill manage."

Ron was indeed star-struck as Chandra and Krum sat down and continued talking about this and that, which made Ron a lot quieter than normal. Harder to deal with were the other students who kept trying to crowd them. It was something that might normally have bothered Al, but he was drifting off into a quiet state of mind that bore a strong resemblance to hiding away, while still being present. But as calm as Chandra tended to be, he still felt annoyed by the interruptions, and after a great many of these, he finally snapped a little.

When another student came to ask Krum for an autograph, Chandra's head whipped around, his mind filling with the image of someone pulling the other student away from behind. To his great surprise, the student jerked backwards with a startled shout and moved away several feet before being let go by the accidental magic. Chandra blinked at this.

"Woah, did you do that?" Ron asked.

"I think I did."

"Guess that means you can still do magic. Or was that Al?"

"He is quiet. I believe that was me, and just me."

"Didn't you tell us you'd cleaned a cauldron with magic the other day?" Hermione asked.

"Yes, I did."

"In that case, you _can_ do magic. Have you tried using wand magic on your own?"

Chandra thought about that a moment, then got out their wand and tried the make his cup levitate.

" _Wingardium Leviosa_ ," he said, but nothing happened.

Hermione's face lit up with understanding. "You're left-handed, Chandra. The wand movements for lefties are different. They make entire books just for left-handed students."

Chandra looked at the wand in his hand, switched it to his right, and tried the spell again that way. It again did not work.

"It feels wrong using the right hand."

"Well yes, most people feel weird trying to use their non-dominant hand for certain things like writing or casting spells. You really do need to get those books for lefties."

He sighed. "So I remain in the same predicament, essentially, of having to learn things all over again."

"Not entirely. The incantations remain the same. All you need to learn is the wand movements."

"If not for the return of Sarcastic Defender, I would not know the incantations, either. But never mind that. I suppose I shall have to write Black Father for left-handed books, years one through four."

 _ **I kinda want to write Sirius anyway. Let him know I'm back.**_

 _~Agreed, Sarcastic Defender.~_

After dinner, Chandra went to their room and started a letter to Sirius. He and Al took turns writing it.

 _Dearest Black Father,_

 _Alastair has returned from hiding. The others remain hidden. Why, I do not know. But there is a complication. Alastair can do magic when he takes control of the body, but I am still unable to do wand magic, though I have done some accidental magic. Hermione has pointed out that because I am left-handed, I will need to learn how to cast left-handed. She says there are books for left-handed students. I will need copies of these for all our courses years one through four, if you could please get me those. In the meantime, I will check the library for their copies of such. Now I hand the reins over to Alastair._

 _Heya, Sirius. I'm back again. I feel better. I don't remember what happened, if anything, while I was gone. I mean down there, in the Basement or subconscious or whatever. When I got back, I got an update from the collective memory about what Chandra got up to while I was gone._

 _We had a wand-weighing ceremony today as part of the Tournament, and that Rita Skeeter woman tried to interview us. She couldn't get any of our names right, so I refused to let her interview us. I ended up having to light her quill and parchment on fire. That was entertaining. It made her shout and call me names, until I silenced her with my wand. She didn't calm down until I made the obvious joke about her being a small annoying insect. This made her freeze and turn pale for some reason. Honestly, she's got to be at least 35, and she's never had anyone make fun of her name before?_

 _The way I came back was interesting. Chandra and Malfoy were about to duel in the hallway outside of Potions, because Chandra couldn't resist mouthing off to Malfoy in his own unique way, which was kinda silly because Chandra can't do any wand magic yet, but I woke up just in time to rescue him._

 _Ah yes, and the Tournament. I didn't put any of our names in, obviously, given the lengths I went to avoid that. And I'm certain I would have known if one of the others had done so. I'm equally certain that not even Zoey would do that to me._

 _I have to admit, I'm a little curious about the implications of all of us just vanishing like that, sans Chandra. I wonder what would have happened if Chandra hadn't appeared? Would we just vanish? Or return to our original form? Something else? And why did the others go with me, anyway? I know why_ I _was down there, but the others... that's a mystery. Maybe they got just as worked up as I did?_

 _Not looking forward to finding out what I'll have to do for the First Task. I may end up getting scared enough to vanish again. I hope not; I don't think Chandra would be able to do it alone, whatever it is._

 _Well, don't forget Chandra's left-handed books. Love ya! Ciao!_

 _Woof;_

 _-Al_

 _Namaste - Chandra_

The next morning, Al awoke to find himself still in Chandra's version of the body. What was odder, for them, was that Chandra was still asleep. He couldn't remember something quite like that happening before. Usually whoever was responsible for the body's appearance was awake even if others were, too. In fact, what usually happened if the driver in that situation fell asleep without the others doing so as well for bedtime, was that they switched forms. He wasn't sure what to make of this new situation.

Pulling off the covers, he frowned at what he saw. Apparently, Chandra slept in the buff sometimes. He hoped very much that there would never be a fire or other emergency when the body was Chandra's; he really didn't want everyone in the school seeing Chandra's dangly bits.

Getting out of bed, he took a shower then got dressed and went down to breakfast. He looked down at his plate, seeing nothing of animal origin except dairy products like cheese. Al sighed and ate it anyway, hoping very much that the house elves weren't going to feed them nothing but Chandra's diet all year long.

Just out of curiosity, he grabbed a piece of bacon. He was pleased to find that, despite the body's appearance, Chandra's questionable gift of picking up on the emotional imprints of dead animals only worked for Chandra. He quickly ate some bacon, worried Chandra would wake up in the middle of it.

The owls came, then, with the mail. Hedwig dropped a letter and a copy of the Daily Prophet down in front of Al/Chandra. He gave Hedwig some bacon and opened the letter from Sirius.

 _Dear Chandra and Al,_

 _Glad to hear you're back, Al! I hope the others return soon, I miss them. Chandra, I'll head to Diagon Alley today and get you those books._

 _Rita Skeeter is covering the Tournament? Of course she is. Arthur doesn't like her, I remember. You're right, she never says anything nice about anyone, except herself. I'm glad you gave her some comeuppance, but I hope you didn't get in trouble for it. And I hope she doesn't savage you even harder with her quill for what you did._

 _I obviously don't know the others as well as you do, but I believe you that none of you put those names in the goblet. Remember how none of the writing matched any of you? And now I've seen Chandra's writing, I can say it doesn't match his either._

 _You need books for left-handed casters? I'll get on that as soon as I can. But, well, have you tried your spare wand? The wand chooses the wizard, it's possible the holly wand might not work for you._

 _By the way, Dumbledore has been getting really worried lately. It's been going on for a while now, apparently. He was really concerned about that dream you had over the summer regarding Voldemort, and it's been getting worse for him. He's hard to read, but those of us who know him well enough can see him worrying. He's been gone more often lately, too, have you noticed? Minerva told me that. Between you and me, I think he's looking for more information regarding that thing he told us about at the end of last year._

 _Well, I'll go see if I can get to Flourish and Blotts before they close. Catch you later, pup!_

 _Ruff! Ruff-ruff!_

 _-Sirius_

Al put the letter away, thinking. He hadn't noticed Dumbledore being gone much, but then he had never seen much of Dumbledore anyway. Shrugging, he folded his hands and closed his eyes to focus on something he needed to do now.

 _ **CHANDRA!**_ He yelled in their shared mindspace. _**WAKEY WAKEY SOY AND FAKEY!**_

Chandra flinched and woke up, looking around in fear for the source of the noise. When he figured it out, he growled.

 _~I should find myself quite pleased if you never did that again, Sarcastic Defender.~_ Chandra said internally in a quite cross tone of voice. _~Eww, and you have imbibed the flesh of the hog in my absence. My tongue screams with the memory of it.~_

 _ **Yeah, well, I had to see your own meat flopping in the breeze this morning, so my poor assaulted eyes have gotten their retribution.**_

 _~If Zoey were here, I would ask her to sing something annoying to bother you.~_

 _ **Yeah, whatever. Anyway, Chandra, have you ever tried casting with the oak and dragon heartstring wand?**_

 _~Oh, yes, I shall willingly put into my hand the wand that screams a dirge of its time as living flesh, because I_ _ **enjoy**_ _suffering.~_

 **Now** _ **who's being sarcastic? Anyway, you never know until you try it. And you don't complain about the holly wand causing you pain.**_

 _~The wand of holly has a core given freely by a being that yet lives and remains free, which did not cause it harm. Tis not the same at all as the Screaming Dragon Wand.~_

 _ **Well we're not getting a**_ **third** _ **wand any time soon, so try it anyway. Ollivander says the wand chooses the wizard. It's a bloody stroke of luck every single one of us doesn't need our own wand. That could get annoying fast. What would we be up to, then? Six different wands?**_

 _~Yes, yes, I shall try the Screaming Dragon Wand if such will silence your folly.~_

Chandra awkwardly used his right hand to get the oak wand out of its sheath on his dominant hand and switched it into his left-handed grip.

 _~The wand movements remain occluded. I fear this shall fail. Also, it feels... disgusting.~_

 _ **Try it anyway.**_

 __ _~You do not fathom. Imagine a telltale heart beating in your hand, whilst simultaneously screaming in tortured agony. That is how this wand feels.~_

 _ **TRY. IT. ANYWAY.**_

Chandra glared, but tried the simplest spell he knew. "Lumos!"

Some white sparks came out, but no light. He tried again, concentrating on the image of light coming out of it. "Lumos!"

More sparks.

 _~This one likes me, despite its agony, and is trying to work for me, but something still remains blocked.~_

 _ **I'll say, if you can't even cast**_ **Lumos** _ **.**_

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the feeling of being in darkness, then seeing light suddenly. "Lumos!"

The wand tip lit up, brighter than the spell usually did, though it was sparking a little, too. The wand also emitted a high-pitched scream that had everyone in the Great Hall clapping their hands over their ears. Chandra canceled the spell at once.

 _~Its calling is perhaps_ too _accurate.~_

 _ **Yes, but you made it work. What was different about that time?**_

 _~I... WOW! I was channeling the emotion of joy at seeing a light in a dark place!~_

 _ **Must be your powers are emotion-based. Try the same technique with the holly wand.**_

Chandra gratefully put the oak wand back, and got out the holly wand.

 _~Like the warm embrace of a lover,~_ Chandra commented.

Again, he filled his mind with the emotions of seeing a light in a dark place. "Lumos!"

The wand tip lit up, normally.

"YES! The blockage is dislodged! Emotions are the key!"

 _ **Hey, I have an idea. Think of a happy thought, and cast the Patronus Charm. My memory will tell you how.**_

Chandra nodded, and concentrated on joy, love, and happiness. "Expecto patronum!"

A large silver shape flowed out of the wand and turned back to look at them.

"What... what is it?"

"Wow," said the voice of Hermione from behind them, as she came into the room. "It's an Amazon river dolphin!"

"Mr. Rahasyamay," said Professor McGonagall from their other side, "as pretty as your patronus is, I ask you to please not do magic in the Great Hall."

"Understood, Professor," Chandra said, putting the wand away. His patronus winked out when he did.

"Thank you, Mr. Rahasyamay," she said, heading back to her seat.

"So Chandra," Hermione started. "You figured out how to do magic now?"

"Yes. The key is emotions."

"Did you get your left-handed books, then, too?"

"No. I did the mirror of the right-handed wand movement."

"Oh. Well that isn't going to work every time. And what do you mean 'the key is emotions'?"

"To make the light of Lumos, I need to to imagine I am in darkness and I see light. That joy fuels the spell."

"Really? You have to use emotions for _all_ spells?"

"Presumably."

"Well that's going to complicate things. And possibly slow you down. Might even make some spells impossible under certain circumstances."

"Oh?"

"Yes. How do you cast something that requires joy when all you're feeling is unhappiness? That might block the patronus if you're faced with a dementor."

"I do not know. But I wonder if this is the special magic I have, that Mother told me of."

"Mother? Who's Mother?"

"You have not met Her yet. It is possible you may never meet Her. I believe She likes to remain Inside."

Ron came in, then, and sat down. He started to eat, clearly unaware anything momentus had happened. Remembering McGonagall's warning, Chandra went back to his meal, though he very much wanted to show off for Ron. He got more and more impatient as time went on, but finally he made it out of breakfast, and grabbed Ron's arm, dragging him into an empty classroom.

"What? Why're we in here?"

"One moment, please."

Chandra imagined feeling light, like he could fly away, and the feeling of freedom that came with it. Then he cast "Wingardium leviosa" on a quill on the desk.

Only... this time, he found himself floating in the air instead. He blinked, unsure how this was possible.

"Well, that was not my intent," he said from the ceiling. "Um... please fetch a teacher, Red Knight?"

When Ron was done laughing, he nodded and went off to find a teacher. A few minutes later, McGonagall came in.

"Mr. Rahasyamay, how on earth did you manage to get up there?"

"I was attempting to make a quill float. I am perplexed how it could have gone awry."

In seconds, McGonagall had him down with her wand, and once more he was subject to gravity. He explained what he had figured out that morning. She nodded here and there. When he finished, she looked confused.

"I've never heard of anyone needing to use emotions to cast magic, except for some spells like the Patronus Charm. But you say you can't cast without it?"

"Indeed. Observe."

He tried casting Lumos again, the way most people did it. Nothing at all happened. Then he did it again, with the emotional component, and it worked.

"I see. Very unusual."

Al took the wand from Chandra and said, "Hi, Professor McGonagall. It's me, Al. _I_ am still able to cast magic normally, even though Chandra can't. Lumos!"

The wand tip lit up. He then demonstrated several other spells.

"Well it seems that life just keeps throwing you surprises, Mr. Potter, Mr. Rahasyamay. I shall discuss this problem with Dumbledore, see if he has any ideas. But my immediate thought is, when casting the levitation charm on the quill, try to imagine it from the quill's perspective?" she said, sounding uncertain.

"Hmm... I shall try that now," Chandra said, taking back the wand. "By the way, this wand still resists me, somewhat. A third wand may indeed be necessary."

 _ **I can always use the oak wand. Go ahead and do the thing.**_

Chandra once more focused on the emotions of flight, trying to picture it from the quill's point of view. In his mind's eye, he could see himself, from the outside.

"Wingardium leviosa!"

The quill flew up, up, up to the ceiling. Then he brought it back down again.

"It would seem magic works very differently for you than for others, Mr. Rahasyamay. I cannot even begin to understand why that might be. Please be cautious when trying new spells, perhaps only do new spells around a teacher from now on?"

"Yes, Professor."

She shook her head slightly and left the room, clearly confused.

 _ **What, no nickname for McGonagall?**_

 _~The Tartan Grandmother would chide me for calling her such, I think.~_

Al snorted with laughter. _**That she would, that she would.**_

 __Later that day, they got from Hermione a copy of the Daily Prophet, which she had brought to show them because Rita Skeeter had done a very scathing article about the Triwizard Tournament, which was mostly about them. Fleur and Krum, their names misspelled, were crammed into the end, and Cedric wasn't even mentioned.

"She has done the thing backwards," Chandra said when he was done reading it. "The important parts are to be the head, but she has them in the rear. The tail and the body, pointing up, are all malevolent garbage words. There is more gold in a gallon of seawater than there is truth in this travesty."

This was apparently so hilarious to Ron and Hermione that they were both leaning against the wall in paroxysms of mirth. Even Al, inside Chandra's head, was laughing.

 _ **Oh my goodness,**_ Al said to him at last, _**I need to introduce you to Luna. It'll be hilarious!**_

 _~Luna? I am going to meet the moon?~_

 _ **Luna Lovegood. She's a Ravenclaw. Come on, I think I know where she'll be.**_

Chandra sighed, and let Al drag him away. Ron and Hermione came after him, trying to ask him where he was going through the laughter.

"The Sarcastic Defender wishes to take me to the moon," he said. "The moon that speaks of oddities."

"Moon that speaks..." Ron said softly, confused. "Wait, do you mean Luna?"

"Yes, the moon that loves well."

"Do you do that just to be annoying?" Ron asked.

"Of course not, Red Knight. I speak as I think. I speak the images in my mind."

They found Luna in a corridor, after a lot of looking around for over an hour. She was walking around humming to herself, her feet bare.

"Why hello there," she said as she saw him. "You're Chandra Rahasyamay."

"Yes. You are Luna Lovegood, I presume?"

"That's correct. You were looking for me?"

"Alastair wanted me to meet you. I am unsure why."

"Yes, I can see the wrackspurts flying around. They make people's brains go fuzzy."

Chandra blinked, and was speechless for a time. "Um... why are you barefoot?" he finally asked.

"Oh, my things occasionally go missing. They always turn up eventually. I must admit, it _is_ a little inconvenient. The castle is starting to get colder. I use warming charms on my feet, of course, but it would be easier with shoes and socks."

"Others are taking your things?"

"That is one possibility. I don't know for sure. I've never seen any of my things vanish. Perhaps there are some invisible sprites that find it amusing to take my things."

"Being barefoot is something one should only be by choice," Chandra said. "I like being barefoot outside, as long as it's warm."

"Me too. I like to pet the thestrals in the Forbidden Forest."

"I admit I have not done that yet. We should get together sometime and do that."

Luna smiled. "I would like that very much."

They stood there looking at one another for what felt like a long time, before Luna spoke again.

"So why did Al bring you here?"

"He thought it would be amusing, for some reason. I cannot fathom his thought patterns sometimes."

Luna nodded sagely.

 _ **Well this isn't nearly as interesting as I'd thought it would be**_ , Al said, sounding bored.

 _~You compared me to her, and you are surprised we are on the same wavelength?~_

 _ **Now that you mention it, that does make sense. I guess that makes me pretty foolish.**_

"Is it just you and Al in there at the moment?"

"Yes. The others are still hiding. They will return in time."

She nodded. "Good."

"Does not the Angry Light-carrier pester you when he discovers you barefoot around the castle?"

"Angry Light-carrier?"

"Argus Filch."

"Ah, yes. Yes, he does sometimes. Not so much anymore. He tends to sigh and hold the bridge of his nose when he sees me barefoot these days."

"Indeed? Well, if you take me to your dorm, I can help you look for your shoes."

She thought about it a moment, then nodded.

"Er, we're gonna go, Chandra," Ron said, motioning at himself and Hermione.

"As you wish, Red Knight," Chandra said, following Luna through the halls.

When they found Ravenclaw's door, with a bronze door-knocker of an eagle. They knocked the knocker, and it asked a riddle: "How is a raven like a writing desk?"

"Hmm..." Chandra said, thinking. "Both are carbon-based. The raven is an animal, and the desk is made of wood from a tree, a plant. But both were alive at some point in their existence. And, ultimately, both are made of material born in the heart of a dying star."

"Er..." the door-knocker said, looking puzzled. "If you say so," it said, the door opening up.

When Chandra and Luna came in, there was some upset among the other Ravenclaws about Chandra being there. Luna explained he was helping her find her shoes, and suddenly everyone went quiet and minded their own business, looking and feeling guilty.

With that out of the way, Chandra bent down and touched Luna's feet, as though feeling for something invisible.

"What are you doing?"

"I can feel objects by their energy. I'm trying to find the... psychic scent, for lack of a better term, of your shoes."

"Ah. Carry on, then."

She stood there, humming to herself as he continued feeling for the 'scent' of her missing shoes. After a couple minutes, he stood up and asked her to take him to her room.

"The stairs will probably turn into a slide if you do that. You're a boy, after all."

"Oh. Hmm... that _is_ a problem."

He stood there, his eyes closed, deep in thought. Then he came up with a plan, but continued to close his eyes in thought. This time, he was concentrating on his solution. He brought to his memory, somehow, the feeling of Iliana's and Adira's bodies, every feeling and emotion they associated with being a girl, and then felt a warm feeling move through his body. Luna, watching, did not see anything unusual.

Opening the body's eyes, Chandra took Luna's hand. "It'll be fine now."

"Hmm? Well, if you say so. You seem so certain."

They went up the stairs, everyone in the room looking tense and expectant. But nothing happened.

"Well that was interesting. What happened?"

"I am currently thinking of myself as a girl," Chandra said as though it was nothing unusual.

"And that's enough to fool the stairs?"

"My magic is based on emotions."

"You didn't change, um... on the outside at all? I mean, physically?"

Chandra reached down to feel between his legs. "No, everything is the same as always."

"Well, that is rather remarkable."

 _ **Yeah, seriously, how did you do that?**_ Al asked.

After a moment of thought, Chandra said, "I think of gender as more of a suggestion, or a mood. And I'm in a girl mood at the moment. Anyway, let's find your shoes."

Chandra's method of finding her shoes involved touching places all over her room, and following some invisible trail to other dorms, a variety of hiding places, some of which were the insides of other peoples' trunks. When Chandra confronted the owners, they fought, but eventually gave in and returned Luna's things. And they ended up finding not only her shoes, socks, and – oddly – underwear, but other belongings of hers.

The whole time this was going on, Luna was observing Chandra. Sure enough, there was something distinctly feminine in... at the moment, _her_ movements, even though she otherwise looked like... well, if Luna was entirely honest with herself, Chandra looked, now, like a short-haired girl, even though nothing outward had changed. It was something much deeper than accidents of biology.

Then a thought occurred to her, and she had to ask Chandra a question because of it.

"If gender is just a suggestion to you, which set of pronouns should I use for you? Do I use the ones for the gender you're feeling like at the moment? Or they/their? Or something else?"

"Hmm... I don't know. I hadn't thought of it before. I've been a boy since I first showed up. I'd never been a girl before today, but it feels right for the moment. I don't even know how long I'll be a girl, now. Pronouns... well, just use the she/her set for now. But honestly... I don't think I really care. Yes, any pronoun set will work for me."

"Ah. Well that simplifies matters. Thank you for letting me know. And thank you for finding my things."

"No problem. If you need help again, let me know."

Luna nodded. "Oh, I think it's almost dinnertime."

"Shall we go down together?"

"Yes, that sounds lovely."

The two of them got even more stares as they came down the stairs without setting them off. Then Chandra also detected some confusion at her own expense, and mixed feelings. Figuring it was a response to her gender shift, she ignored it.

There were more stares at the Griffindor table at dinner. Several of their friends asked if Adira or Iliana was back.

"No, I just feel like a girl at the moment."

Apparently used to weird things from them, everyone just ignored them and went back to their dinner.

Chandra was curious, later in their dorm, at the fact that she still felt like a girl. She stripped nude and examined herself in the mirror. It all looked the same as usual, but different. Where all these body parts had belonged to Chandra the Boy earlier, now they belonged to Chandra the Girl.

She was in the middle of a hot shower when the mood changed and he felt like a boy again. Another look in the mirror showed nothing was physically different; it was all in his head. He shrugged, and dried his hair with his wand before going to bed.

As though some kind of blockage had been dislodged by his stint as a girl the day before, Chandra woke up feeling... mixed. A little bit a boy, a little bit a girl. It wasn't anything concrete, it's not like he had a girl's left arm and a boy's right arm, just... mixed. Like how it might feel if you mixed blue water with yellow water, and you _were_ the water. He shrugged, and went on with his day.

It was a bit odd for them, now that it was just Chandra and Al for the next week or so, and the body apparently stuck on Chandra's form for some reason. Chandra was pretty chill, but it was getting harder and harder for him to ignore Al's growing panic, as the unknown First Task was approaching. No longer content with letters, Al would fire-call Sirius every couple days in a panic, saying things like "What if it's dementors! What if I have to fight dementors!" or "I read about this creature called a Nundu, like a leopard or something the size of an elephant; what if I have to get past one of those?" and other such scenarios. He even started writing letters to Javier along the same lines, leading Chandra to have to calm down both him _and_ Al.

 _~AL! Do not overexcite yourself. If you vanish again, I will be at more of a disadvantage than usual. Do not do that to me.~_

 _ **Sorry, Chandra. Just... I don't know what we're going to do. I doubt we have time to think of anything even if everyone else shows up tonight. And how do I fight what I don't know?**_

 _~The adults will do their utmost to keep us safe.~_

 _ **HA! Like I trust them. Gah... I can't even cuddle my boyfriend without it getting awkward.**_

 __ _~My apologies, Sarcastic Defender. I have been trying to make the switch, but I rather suspect I'm the one who is to face the danger.~_

 _ **YOU? You're still trying to work out how to do simple spells without ending up inside a wall or hanging from a windowsill, or turning into a canary.**_

 _~I cannot explain it yet. But perhaps it has something to do with the emotional nature of my magic?~_

Al didn't have an answer to that.

Having to catch up on left-handed casting, which was indeed a part of his problem, Chandra ended up in the library reading the books Sirius sent him, with Hermione and Ron nearby. Ron was having a hard time concentrating. Chandra wasn't doing very well, either, with Al running through a cavalcade of terrible situations as though it was a mantra against any of those things happening, but also doomed to ensure something worse would happen instead.

Viktor Krum was in the library a lot, too. He and Chandra did like to talk with each other on occasion, but Chandra was getting to be less and less good at conversation as Al's constant stream of doomsaying made it harder to think straight. Even with all that going on, Chandra still picked up on Krum's interest in Hermione, who had about as much interest in Krum's fame as she'd had in the skrewts.

It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up. The days until the first task seemed to slip by as though someone had fixed the clocks to work at double speed. Al's feeling of barely controlled panic was with him wherever he went, as ever-present as the snide comments about the _Daily Prophet_ article.

On the Saturday before the first task, all students in the third year and above were permitted to visit the village of Hogsmeade. Hermione and Ron told Chandra and Al that it would do them good to get away from the castle for a bit, and neither boy needed much persuasion. But between the usual treatment they got for being a multiple, the extra-horrible treatment lately for daring to steal Cedric's glory, and the snide comments about Rita Skeeter's article, neither wanted to be seen there, so Chandra ended up going to Hogsmeade under the invisibility cloak.

Al felt wonderfully free under the cloak; he watched other students walking past them as they entered the village, most of them sporting _Support Cedric Diggory_! badges, but no horrible remarks came their way for a change, and nobody was quoting that stupid article.

"This is weird," Ron said. "I mean, it could be weirder; at least Hermione is here. But I don't like talking to air."

"Yeah well I don't really give a flying shit," Al's harsh tones came through Chandra's voice more acutely than usual.

"Come _on,_ please just take off your cloak for a bit, no one's going to bother you here."

"Oh yeah?" said Al. "Look behind you."

Rita Skeeter and her photographer friend had just emerged from the Three Broomsticks pub. Talking in low voices, they passed right by Hermione and Ron without looking at them. Al backed into the wall of Honeydukes to stop Rita Skeeter from hitting him with her crocodile-skin handbag. When they were gone, Al said, "She's staying in the village. I bet she's coming to watch the first task."

As he said it, his stomach flooded with a wave of molten panic. He didn't mention this; he'd stopped spouting doomsday scenarios at them days ago, because Hermione looked close to tears when he did, and Ron would look sick as a pig.

"She's gone," said Hermione, looking right through Al toward the end of the street. "Why don't we go and have a butterbeer in the Three Broomsticks, it's a bit cold, isn't it?"

"Sounds good. Let's do that."

The place was utterly packed, making it hard to move around under the invisibility cloak, but he managed it. Soon they found a table, and Ron went to get the drinks.

As he sipped butterbeer under his cloak, he watched the crowd. What wouldn't he have given to be one of these people, sitting around laughing and talking, with nothing to worry about but homework? He imagined how it would have felt to be here if their names _hadn't_ come out of the Goblet of Fire. He wouldn't be wearing the Invisibility Cloak, for one thing. Ron, Hermione, and himself would probably be happily, openly imagining what deadly dangerous task the school champions would be facing on Tuesday. He'd have been really looking forward to it, watching them do whatever it was, cheering on Cedric with everyone else, safe in a seat at the back of the stands.

He wondered how the other champions were feeling. Every time he had seen Cedric lately, he had been surrounded by admirers and looking nervous but excited. Al glimpsed Fleur Delacour from time to time in the corridors; she looked exactly as she always did, haughty and unruffled. And Krum just sat in the library, poring over books.

"Look, it's Hagrid!" said Hermione.

The back of Hagrid's enormous shaggy head emerged over the crowd. Al wondered why he hadn't spotted him at once, as Hagrid was so large, but standing up carefully, he saw that Hagrid had been leaning low, talking to Professor Moody. Hagrid had his usual enormous tankard in front of him, but Moody was drinking from his hip flask. Madam Rosmerta, the pretty landlady, didn't seem to think much of this; she was looking askance at Moody as she collected glasses from tables around them. Perhaps she thought it was an insult to her mulled mead, but Al knew better. Moody had told them all during their last Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson that he preferred to prepare his own food and drink at all times, as it was so easy for Dark wizards to poison an unattended cup. It had sounded like a good idea to Al, who was determined to look more into that if he lived through the First Task.

As Al watched, he saw Hagrid and Moody get up to leave. He waved, then remembered that Hagrid couldn't see him. Moody, however, paused, his magical eye on the corner where Chandra was standing. He tapped Hagrid in the small of the back (being unable to reach his shoulder), muttered something to him, and then the pair of them made their way back across the pub toward the table the three of them were sitting at.

 _ **He can see through invisibility cloaks? Creepy.**_

"All right, Hermione?" said Hagrid loudly.

"Hello," said Hermione, smiling back.

Moody limped around the table and bent down, on the pretext of reading from a book he hadn't noticed Hermione had out. Then he muttered, "Nice cloak, Potter."

Ignoring the use of the wrong name given it was Chandra's body at the moment, Al sighed. "So you _can_ see through invisibility cloaks, then?"

"Yeah, it can see through Invisibility Cloaks," Moody said quietly. "And it's come in useful at times, I can tell you."

Hagrid was beaming down at Al too. Al knew Hagrid couldn't see him, but Moody had obviously told Hagrid he was there. Hagrid now bent down on the pretext of reading from Hermione's book as well, and said in a whisper so low that only Al could hear it, "Al, meet me tonight at midnight at me cabin. Wear that cloak."

Straightening up, Hagrid said loudly, "Nice ter see yeh, Hermione, Ron," winked, and departed. Moody followed him.

"Why does Hagrid want me to meet him at midnight?" Al said, very surprised.

"Does he?" said Ron, looking startled.

Hermione frowned. "I wonder what he's up to? I don't know whether you should go, Al, it'll be past curfew, and it could be dangerous. We don't know who put your name in that goblet, after all."

It was odd indeed. But if Hagrid thought it worth the risk, so did Al and Chandra. So they went to their bedroom early and waited for the night to come. At half past eleven, they got under the cloak, escaped the common room with Hermione's help, and wound their way through the school and out onto the grounds to Hagrid's cabin.

The large man wasn't alone when they got there; he was with Madame Maxime. Whatever Hagrid was showing him, he was showing her, too, on the pretense of a date. Al would have suspected her of using Hagrid for information, but a glimpse into her eyes told him she was honestly interested in Hagrid.

It was a very long walk to wherever they were going, but then — when they had walked so far around the perimeter of the forest that the castle and the lake were out of sight — Al heard something. Men were shouting up ahead … then came a deafening, earsplitting roar.

Hagrid led Madame Maxime around a clump of trees and came to a halt. Al hurried up alongside them — for a split second, he thought he was seeing bonfires, and men darting around them — and then his mouth fell open.

 _Dragons._

Four fully grown, enormous, vicious-looking dragons were rearing onto their hind legs inside an enclosure fenced with thick planks of wood, roaring and snorting — torrents of fire were shooting into the dark sky from their open, fanged mouths, fifty feet above the ground on their outstretched necks. There was a silvery-blue one with long, pointed horns, snapping and snarling at the wizards on the ground; a smooth-scaled green one, which was writhing and stamping with all its might; a red one with an odd fringe of fine gold spikes around its face, which was shooting mushroom-shaped fire clouds into the air; and a gigantic black one, more lizard-like than the others, which was nearest to them.

What was worse, it took dozens of wizards to control them. Magic seemed to mostly just bounce off their hides. And Charlie was there, among the men controlling the dragons. He came over to talk with Hagrid, and from the conversation, Al found that they were nesting mothers, and the Champions would have to get past the dragons for the First Task.

While Al just sat there gibbering, Chandra frowned and hoped that neither the dragons nor their eggs would be hurt by this.

Al, meanwhile, felt something die inside him, and fought the urge to retreat into the Basement again with the others. No, if he went down there this time, he would claw them back up to the surface if it killed him.

They rushed back to the castle, into Griffindor common room, and grabbed some Floo powder out of their trunk, then went down to the fire in the grate and tossed some in to fire-call Sirius at home.

"Sirius! SIRIUS!"

Sirius came running again, like he had the night Al splinched himself, his wand out.

"What is it? What's wrong?"

"The First Task is DRAGONS!"

"What? Oh. _Oh._ Dragons? How do you know?"

"Hagrid showed me. So what am I going to DO?"

Sirius looked at him, eyes full of concern, eyes that had not yet lost the look that Azkaban had given them — that deadened, haunted look. "Dragons we can deal with, Al, Chandra, but we'll get to that in a minute. There are things I need to warn you about, that were too sensitive for a letter."

"What?" said Al, feeling his spirits slip a further few notches. … Surely there could be nothing worse than dragons coming?

"Karkaroff," said Sirius. "Al, he was a Death Eater. You know what Death Eaters are, don't you?"

"Moldywart's lot, yes I know. He was? How do you know?"

"He was caught, he was in Azkaban with me, but he got released. I'd bet everything that's why Dumbledore wanted an Auror at Hogwarts this year — to keep an eye on him. Moody caught Karkaroff. Put him into Azkaban in the first place."

"They let him go? A captured Death Eater got free and now he runs a school? How did this happen?"

"He did a deal with the Ministry of Magic," said Sirius bitterly. "He said he'd seen the error of his ways, and then he named names … he put a load of other people into Azkaban in his place. … He's not very popular in there, I can tell you. And since he got out, from what I can tell, he's been teaching the Dark Arts to every student who passes through that school of his. So watch out for the Durmstrang champion as well."

"Krum is a good guy. I can tell, remember? It doesn't work on Dumbledore, Snape, or Moody for some reason, though."

"I think I know why that is, Al – something Dumbledore said recently is relevant – but that's for later. You really do need to be wary of Karkaroff. He may have turned traitor on the Death Eaters, but he's still a dark wizard."

"Yes, okay, but are you saying Karkaroff put my name in the goblet? Because if he did, he's a really good actor. He seemed furious about it. He wanted to stop me from competing."

"We know he's a good actor," said Sirius, "because he convinced the Ministry of Magic to set him free, didn't he? Now, I've been keeping an eye on the _Daily Prophet,_ Al —"

"— you and the rest of the world," said Al bitterly.

"— and reading between the lines of that Skeeter woman's article last month, Moody was attacked the night before he started at Hogwarts. Yes, I know she says it was another false alarm," Sirius said hastily, seeing Al about to speak, "but I don't think so, somehow. I think someone tried to stop him from getting to Hogwarts. I think someone knew their job would be a lot more difficult with him around. And no one's going to look into it too closely; Mad-Eye's heard intruders a bit too often. But that doesn't mean he can't still spot the real thing. Moody was the best Auror the Ministry ever had."

"Okay, I'll stay wary. I haven't had a chance to use my heart-reading sense on Karkaroff, but I'll try to do that ASAP."

"Good. Don't go to any great risks to do it, though."

"I won't. But if he's turned traitor on the Death Eaters, why do you think he wants me dead?"

Sirius hesitated.

"I've been hearing some very strange things," he said slowly. "The Death Eaters seem to be a bit more active than usual lately. They showed themselves at the Quidditch World Cup, didn't they? We fought them, after all. Then did you hear about that ministry witch who went missing?"

"No. Who is it?"

"A witch named Bertha Jorkins-"

"Bertha Jorkins?" Al interrupted "I recognize that name. She was mentioned in the dream I had about Voldemort. Molywart mentioned her himself. She was imperiused to help care for him, nurse him back to health. Which is odd, since he's supposed to be a spirit. Maybe he found or made a temporary body for himself? Yes, yes he had to have, he was holding a wand."

"Oh really? I don't remember you saying anything like that when you told me about it."

"It was fading rapidly, the way dreams do. But you mentioning her name brought some details back."

"So he definitely has her, then? I should relay this to Dumbledore in the morning, assuming he's in. He's been out and about a lot more lately, did you notice?"

"No, I didn't. We've been kind of distracted, and we rarely see him much anyway. But back to Bertha Jorkins, how did she get taken?"

"I'm not sure, pup, but she was last seen in Albania, which is where Voldemort was last spotted. And I knew her in school, she wasn't very bright, and she was nosier than Rita Skeeter. She'd have been easy to lure into a trap. I just wish I knew who was helping him. I know lots of his Death Eaters slithered out of Azkaban, but then why did it take this person 13 years to find his master? Also there's Trelawney's prophecy, the second one, to consider. She said whoever it was was chained for all those years. I haven't heard of any more Azkaban breakouts. Only news out of Azkaban recently was the deaths of Peter and Bellatrix."

"Speaking of which, did you ever find out about her vault? She was close to Voldemort. And Tom never had a vault in Gringotts, but I'm sure he'd want one. If he couldn't get one, I think he'd want one of his horcruxes in there. And he trusted Bellatrix, didn't he? I've been doing some research on her," he explained.

"Hmm... I hadn't thought of that before. But to answer your question, Bellatrix's vault is a complicated issue. Rudolphus can't inherit her vault because he's in Azkaban. Her parents are dead, and I'm only a cousin. So it goes to her closest living relative, who I hate to say is Narcissa Malfoy née Black, her sister. If there's a horcrux in that vault, it's still under Death Eater control."

"Damn. Well anyway, going back a bit more, if Moldywart has this Ministry witch Jorkins, he must have known ahead of time about the Tournament. Do you think he's gotten back in contact with Karkaroff? And ordered the man to kill me?"

"I don't know," said Sirius slowly, "I just don't know … Karkaroff doesn't strike me as the type who'd go back to Voldemort unless he knew Voldemort was powerful enough to protect him. But whoever put your name in that goblet did it for a reason, and I can't help thinking the tournament would be a very good way to attack you and make it look like an accident."

"Looks like a really good plan from where I'm standing," said Al grinning bleakly. "They'll just have to stand back and let the dragons do their stuff."

"Right — these dragons," said Sirius, speaking very quickly now. "There's a way, Al. Don't be tempted to try a Stunning Spell — dragons are strong and too powerfully magical to be knocked out by a single Stunner, you need about half a dozen wizards at a time to overcome a dragon —"

"Yeah, I know, I just saw," said Al.

"But you can do it alone," said Sirius. "There is a way, and a simple spell's all you need. It's called the Conjunctivitis Curse. A dragon's eyes are its weakest point, and the spell irritates the eyes like the disease conjunctivitis, AKA 'pink eye.' The-"

"Will this hexing pain the creature?" asked Chandra, who up until now had been content to let Al use his body as his own.

"Well, yes, it is painful. Not terribly so, but one needs to put a lot of power into it for a dragon, so that might make it hurt worse."

"I will not be party to the harming of another living being, then."

"Wait, is that Chand-"

"Are you MAD?" Al addressed the other boy aloud, mainly so Sirius would know they were having this conversation. "That thing is going to be trying to kill us, I don't think we should worry about irritating its-"

"It is a nesting mother, chosen no doubt for its ferocity protecting its young. They are using real eggs, which is monstrous. It is an endangered species and they risk its young for sport. If we hurt it and it hurts its young due to this agony, I will take retribution for it by hexing the fools who dreamed up this folly!"

"So what, you want to just politely ask the dragon to let us pass safely, is that it? Maybe I'll shout parseltongue at it really, really loudly and hope something with legs still counts as a snake, shall I?"

"I doubt such is possible. But we nonetheless need to find another way."

"Well pardon me if I don't fancy dying just because you're too much of a bleeding-heart-"

"BOYS!" Sirius shouted. "This is getting us nowhere. The Conjunctivitis Curse is all I can think of offhand. Now we do have another 24 hours or so before the First Task. I'll try to come up with something better, if Chandra doesn't want to do it. Just for your information, though, the incantation is _Conjunctivitis_ , easy enough to remember. The wand movement you'll have to look up in the library. Ask Madam Pince about it, if it's for the Tournament she shouldn't have a problem showing you the right book. In the meantime, you two try to calm down, put your heads together, and think outside of the box for an alternate solution, okay?"

"But all we're allowed is our wand, Sirius! And that feels like a normal twig compared to a bloody great dragon!"

"Well shoot a Patronus at it, then. Have the Patronus corral the dragon away from you, maybe that'll work?"

Al blinked, then stared at Sirius.

"I... well, that's worth trying, I guess. But it's not a dementor. And if the dragon figures out it's not a solid object, then that's the end of that ruse. So we should think of some more things."

"Yes. And ask anyone else you can think of. Like your boyfriend, Al. You said he wants to be an Artificer, right? Well he might not be there yet, but he might know something that can help."

"I'm only allowed a _wand_ Sirius!"

"Hmm... well as I recall, you should be learning the Summoning Charm in your fourth year. I remember from my own school days, plus I was looking through those left-handed books before I sent them to you. Have you learned that one yet?"

"We've been able to do the Summoning Charm since first term last year. We read and practice ahead a lot."

"Excellent. Glad to know you're doing so well."

"Anyway, so... what? You reckon I can just Summon something useful? You think that'll be allowed?"

"I don't see why not. You step into the game with only your wand, that satisfies the rules; what you do with it after that is just wriggling through the loopholes."

"Figures an old trouble-maker like you would be skilled at finding loopholes."

Sirius chuckled.

"Well that's something to ponder, at least. Now I just have to figure out _what_ to summon, and what to do with it when I do."

"Good. Well it's late, we should both be getting to bed now."

"True. Good night, Sirius! See you later!"

Al pulled their head out of the fire and went upstairs to bed. It took him a long time to get to sleep, though, as he kept trying to figure out what he could possibly summon to deal with a dragon.

End note: I wasn't intending on Chandra being genderfluid when I started this chapter, but it felt so right when it came up; another example of the character writing itself. And again, I base the Potter collective on my own collective, and four of our number are genderfluid, while another is completely without gender.

End note two: Al's sarcastic suggestion about "shouting parseltongue" at the dragon comes from another fanfic I read. It's called "My Brother" by Oracle2Phoenix on . It is a great fic, though sadly it remains uncompleted and was last updated in July of 2016; the author's computer died horribly and I guess they still haven't recovered from the fallout of that. But it's well worth reading nonetheless.

End note three:

Bigots: "Stop with all this transgender stuff!" Me: _Dials the transgender stuff up to "12."_

Bigots: "We don't like all this queer stuff!" Me: "If you're holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time. " - Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

End note four: I was going to have Krum explain the French pun that Voldemort's name is, but I've seen like 5 different possible meanings for his name, and not knowing French, I have no idea which one is correct.


	28. The First Task

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 28"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-eight: The First Task**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}.__ _And now_ _ _~Chandra.~__

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

Against Chandra's wishes, Al still managed to force control of the body in order to get to the library the next day and look up the wand movements for the Conjunctivitis Curse. He was allowed to take the book with him to practice.

 _ **For crying out loud, Chandra, it's not like it's really gonna hurt the damn thing. It's just pink eye, that's not all that bad. Might be a little jarring getting it from a spell, but so what?**_

 _~I have told you already, it might in its agony blindly thrash around, and if its eggs got hurt, I would be extremely sorrowful and angry.~_

 _ **Fine, whatever, I'll try not to hurt it. But I make no promises. I want to survive this Tournament, after all.**_

 _~As do I.~_

It was impossible to practice the Conjunctivitis Curse without a target. But they were going to have to practice it that way anyway, because the only counter to the Conjunctivitis Curse was something called the Oculus Potion, which contained stewed mandrake, ground unicorn horn, and something called 'crystalized water,' whatever _that_ was. He didn't want to take a chance that Snape would deny him a potion that was plainly expensive to brew just so he could practice a curse on another person or animal, even if it was necessary to save his life, though it might be a useful spell for Malfoy later. He made do, then, with casting the curse at inanimate objects, but only after putting protective goggles on and locking the door with a _colloportus_ to prevent others from getting hit with the hex. When he was consistently sending pink light to crash against objects, knocking them over, he considered he was doing it well enough and stopped, to go look for ideas for a plan Chandra would be happy with.

"An object to summon with your wand that can work against a dragon?" Javier said thoughtfully when Al had asked him for input. "Well, the first thing that comes to mind is a broomstick."

"A broomstick? Why?"

"Well obviously you could fly past the dragon, I suppose."

"Yeah I guess I could, but brooms are kinda, well... flammable."

"So are _you_ , if you get hit by dragon fire."

"I guess. I dunno, I was kinda hoping you'd tell me there was some kind of magic pan pipes that would put a dragon to sleep like the Pied Piper did to the rats of Hamlin, or something like that."

"Not that I've ever heard of. Nothing real, anyway. A few myths, like that one."

"Damn."

"Well I'll do some research for you, but there's not a lot of time left. Even if I found something else, there's probably not time to actually _get_ one before the task."

"Yeah you're probably right. But a broomstick, okay, yeah, maybe I can fly past it. Fly past a giant flying lizard that blows fire out its mouth, should be easy peasy."

That had been sarcasm, though; he was rapidly becoming convinced that nothing was going to work. What if he flew on a broomstick and got charred to barbeque? What if he used the Conjunctivitis Curse and the dragon stomped on him? Even if he used both those things, he'd likely get the Horntail, and then it might blindly take his head off with its tail while thrashing around in agony. About the only safe thing he could think of was burrowing under the ground, but the only digging spell he knew wasn't very fast or efficient, and how would he see where he was going? Also, what if the dragon's stomping feet caved in the tunnel and suffocated him? He was starting to take the idea of shouting parseltongue at the dragon seriously. What if a dragon _did_ count as a serpent? Could he convince it to let him past?

Or – a sudden thought struck him – could he call the basilisk from there? Unlikely; the dragon enclosure was way too far away. Even amplifying his voice with the spell he'd witnessed Bagman using over the summer wouldn't carry all the way to the school, let alone into the Chamber of Secrets. Besides, that would be far too dangerous. Even assuming the basilisk heard his commands well enough to close its eyes, there was still the risk that it might hurt someone else, either by accident or by changing its mind about taking orders from him. And using a basilisk against a dragon, well... if Chandra didn't like the Conjunctivitis Curse, he sure as heck wasn't going to approve of siccing a bloody great basilisk on the dragon.

Besides which, that would kind of expose the lie about the basilisk being dead, not to mention reopening the whole 'Potter is the Heir of Slytherin' nonsense again, and possibly getting the school closed. Best case scenario, he would tip his hand to Moldywart for no really good reason. No, the basilisk was an ace up his sleeve, and he was nowhere _near_ desperate enough to use _that_ tool yet.

So, risky as it was, it would have to be the broom.

"Oh SHIT!" he said aloud, woken out of his thoughts by a realization.

"Oh yeah, you've got Herbology, don't you?" Javier asked.

"Yeah but that's not it. Cedric doesn't know! Maxime was there, Karkaroff was there... Cedric is the only one who doesn't know about the dragons! I gotta go!"

He found Cedric when he ran into a corridor and spotted the older boy down the hall with some of his friends, by the bottom of the marble staircases. Al didn't want to talk in front of them, they were some of the ones who were quoting Rita Skeeter's scathing article at him the most, every time he went near them. He followed Cedric at a distance and saw that he was heading toward the Charms corridor. This gave him an idea. Pausing at a distance from them, he pulled out his wand, and took careful aim.

" _Diffindo_!"

Cedric's bag split. Parchment, quills, and books spilled out of it onto the floor. Several bottles of ink smashed.

"Don't bother," said Cedric in an exasperated voice as his friends bent down to help him. "Tell Flitwick I'm coming, go on."

This was exactly what Al had been hoping for. He slipped his wand back into his robes, waited until Cedric's friends had disappeared into their classroom, and hurried up the corridor, which was now empty of everyone but himself and Cedric.

"Hi," said Cedric, picking up a copy of _A Guide to Advanced Transfiguration_ that was now splattered with ink. "My bag just split … brand-new and all …"

"Cedric," said Al. "The First Task. It's dragons."

"What?" said Cedric, looking up.

"Dragons," said Al, speaking quickly, in case Professor Flitwick came out to see where Cedric had got to. "They've got four, one for each of us, and we've got to get past them."

Cedric stared at him. Al saw some of the panic he'd been feeling since Saturday night flickering in Cedric's gray eyes.

"Are you sure?" Cedric said in a hushed voice.

"As sure as I am that you're standing in front of me right now," said Al. "I've seen them."

"But how did you find out? We're not supposed to know."

"That's not important. But I'm not the only one who knows. Fleur and Krum will know by now — Maxime and Karkaroff both saw the dragons too."

Cedric straightened up, his arms full of inky quills, parchment, and books, his ripped bag dangling off one shoulder. He stared at Al, and there was a puzzled, almost suspicious look in his eyes.

"Why are you telling me?" he asked.

Al stared at him like he'd grown a second head. "Because this whole damn thing is daft! Fighting dragons, or getting past them or whatever. DRAGONS! I'm ahead of my year in a lot of ways, known the Summoning Charm since the first half of last year, but I've seen those damned things myself, and it took like a dozen wizards to subdue just one of them! I don't want you to die for some stupid tournament. I mean yes, you chose this and I didn't, but honestly, the whole wizarding world is insane. And anyway, it's fair. Now everyone's on equal footing."

Cedric was still looking at him in a slightly suspicious way when Al heard a familiar clunking noise behind him. He turned around and saw Mad-Eye Moody emerging from a nearby classroom.

"Come with me, Potter," he growled. "Diggory, off you go."

"Um, I have to be in Herbology, Professor Moody."

"Never mind that, Potter. In my office, please."

 _ **Damn it, how screwed am I now,**_ he thought. _**Is he going to turn me into a newt?**_ It would be easier to get past a dragon as a newt, but he'd have a devil of a time if he had to grab something bigger than himself.

He followed Moody into his office. Moody closed the door behind them and turned to look at Al, his magical eye fixed upon him as well as the normal one.

"That was a very decent thing you just did, Potter," Moody said quietly.

Al didn't know what to say. Neither did Chandra.

"Sit down," said Moody, and Al sat, looking around.

The office was very different from the two times he'd been there before, under Lockhart and Lupin. Now it was full of a number of exceptionally odd objects that Al supposed Moody had used in the days when he had been an Auror.

On his desk stood what looked like a large, cracked, glass spinning top; Al recognized it at once as a Sneakoscope, because he owned one himself, though it was much smaller than Moody's. In the corner on a small table stood an object that looked something like an extra-squiggly, golden television aerial. It was humming slightly. What appeared to be a mirror hung opposite Al on the wall, but it was not reflecting the room. Shadowy figures were moving around inside it, none of them clearly in focus.

"Like my Dark Detectors, do you?" said Moody, who was watching Al closely.

"Yeah. What's that?" Al asked, pointing at the squiggly golden aerial.

"Secrecy Sensor. Vibrates when it detects concealment and lies … no use here, of course, too much interference — students in every direction lying about why they haven't done their homework. Been humming ever since I got here. I had to disable my Sneakoscope because it wouldn't stop whistling. It's extra-sensitive, picks up stuff about a mile around. Of course, it could be picking up more than kid stuff," he added in a growl.

"And what's the mirror for?"

"Oh that's my Foe-Glass. See them out there, skulking around? I'm not really in trouble until I see the whites of their eyes. That's when I open my trunk."

He let out a short, harsh laugh, and pointed to the large trunk under the window. It had seven keyholes in a row. Al wondered what was in there, until Moody's next question brought him sharply back to earth.

"So … found out about the dragons, have you?"

"Yes. But I'm not telling you how."

"Good on you. I don't want to know. But cheating's a traditional part of the Tri-wizard Tournament and always has been."

"Yes, well, I wouldn't normally, but given that this wasn't my choice, and it's life or death, I'll do whatever I can to survive."

Moody chuckled. "Bit of an odd thing to hear from a Griffindor. More something a Slytherin would say."

"More something that someone sane who values living would say," Al countered. "Bravery is all well and good, but bravery without a plan – without a willingness to do whatever you can to stay alive and (if necessary) keep others alive, too – is just recklessness."

"Well spoken, lad. Well spoken. Anyway, I wasn't judging you, laddie. I've been telling Dumbledore from the start, he can be as high-minded as he likes, but you can bet old Karkaroff and Maxime won't be. They'll have told their champions everything they can. They want to win. They want to beat Dumbledore. They'd like to prove he's only human."

Moody gave another harsh laugh, and his magical eye swiveled around so fast it made Al feel queasy to watch it.

"So … got any ideas how you're going to get past your dragon yet?" said Moody.

"A few. Sirius told me about the Conjunctivitis Curse, but Chandra refuses to have anything to do with it. Says it might hurt the dragon, or its eggs."

"Hmm... well he's not wrong. That curse does hurt a fair bit, and dragons aren't especially accustomed to getting sick. The only disease I know for sure they can get is dragon pox, which wizards and witches can also get. In fact, we got it from the dragons. Prob'ly why it kills so many people; dragons are tougher than us. Takes more to hurt them.

"But yeah, the dragon might stomp around in pain. I don't know or care about the eggs, but yeah, it could stomp on you while it's in pain. What're some of your other ideas, laddie?"

"Sirius suggesting casting a Patronus after it. Then he mentioned Summoning something once I get in there. And Javier suggested I summon my broomstick and fly around the thing."

"That sounds like a good plan to me. From what I'm privy to about the Tournament, I don't see any reason it shouldn't work. Granted, you should always try to prepare for unexpected turns of events."

"'Expect the unexpected,' eh?"

Moody chuckled. "Exactly."

Al smiled at Moody. Moody gave the best approximation of a smile his ruined face could manage. It was a rather unsettling thing to see.

"Well, now that I'm assured you have a plan, I'll let you be on your way, then. Off to class, sonny jim. Here's a note for Sprout, and Filch if necessary," he said, handing Al a note explaining why he was late.

Al nodded, took the note, and left.

To give himself something to do while he waited, Al practiced a bunch of other spells out of the book of curses he'd gotten from Madam Pince when he'd been looking for the Conjunctivitis Curse. Some of them were too difficult for him at his level, but others were doable. He practiced constantly, using unused classrooms to do so. He preferred casting against the walls, which were resistant to spells, at least to the ones he could cast.

Chandra, for his own part, focused on trying to calm Al. And either he was succeeding, or Al was just distracted, but either way the blind panic was subdued for a time. It returned in full measure, however, on the following morning. The atmosphere in the school was one of great tension and excitement. Lessons were to stop at midday, giving all the students time to get down to the dragons' enclosure — though of course, they didn't yet know what they would find there.

Al felt oddly separate from everyone around him, whether they were wishing him good luck or hissing " _We'll have a box of tissues ready, Potter_ " as he passed. It was a state of nervousness so advanced that he wondered whether he mightn't just lose his head when they tried to lead him out to his dragon, and start trying to curse everyone in sight. Time was behaving in a more peculiar fashion than ever, rushing past in great dollops, so that one moment he seemed to be sitting down in his first lesson, History of Magic, and the next, walking into lunch … and then (where had the morning gone? the last of the dragon-free hours?), Professor McGonagall was hurrying over to him in the Great Hall. Lots of people were watching. He looked down at himself, not sure he'd even dressed, and found that he was dressed in comfortable Muggle slacks and a loose shirt. He supposed Chandra had dressed them, it didn't seem like anything _he_ would choose.

"Mr. Rahasyamay, the champions have to come down onto the grounds now. You have to get ready for your first task."

Al's heart suddenly felt like it was being squeezed, at these words. He began to hyperventilate, wheezing. He was going to die, he knew it. He suddenly remembered that without Iliana, he was pants at flying. Either he did the task and got killed by a dragon, probably by falling right into its mouth while trying to fly, or he ran away and was killed by the Goblet's geas. As panic gripped him, he felt his eyes watering with tears, and the urge to vanish away where the others were still hiding.

He stood up, intent on physically running away, when he felt a soft, warm feeling flood his being. He still felt scared, and wanted to run, but he would face his doom now.

Al tried to move, and found he couldn't.

 _~I cannot risk you flying away,~_ Chandra said in their shared mind-space, _~so I have locked you in a gilded cage for now. I will face the Scaly Mother for you, Sarcastic Defender. Try to be at peace.~_

 _ **PEACE? PEACE? ARE**_ _ **YOU**_ _ **MAD?**_

But he felt the volume of his voice in their head diminish, and his mind flashed with the image of Chandra turning a volume knob down. He was being muted!

"Mr. Rahasyamay?" Professor McGonagall asked in concern. "We need to go, now."

"Yes, Tartan Grandmother. I have calmed the Sarcastic Defender. I shall face the Scaly Mother now. Lead the way."

"Good luck, Chandra, Al," Hermione whispered. "You'll be fine!"

"Yeah, you'll be fine, mate," said Ron.

"I shall endeavor to prove you correct, both of you."

He left the Great Hall with Professor McGonagall. She didn't seem herself either; in fact, she looked nearly as anxious as Hermione and Ron. As she walked him down the stone steps and out into the cold November afternoon, she put her hand on his shoulder.

"Now, don't panic," she said, "just keep a cool head. We've got wizards standing by to control the situation if it gets out of hand. The main thing is just to do your best, and nobody will think any the worse of you. Are you all right?"

"I am well. I have faith in myself and in my destiny. And I have Mother on my side."

She was leading him toward the place where the dragons were, around the edge of the forest, but when they approached the clump of trees behind which the enclosure would be clearly visible, Chandra and Al saw that a tent had been erected, its entrance facing them, screening the dragons from view.

"You're to go in here with the other champions," said Professor McGonagall, in a rather shaky sort of voice, "and wait for your turn. Mr. Bagman is in there, he'll be telling you the — the procedure. Good luck."

"Blessings," Chandra responded.

Fleur Delacour was sitting in a corner on a low wooden stool. She didn't look nearly as composed as usual, but rather pale and clammy. Viktor Krum looked even surlier than usual, which Chandra supposed was his way of showing nerves. Cedric was pacing up and down. When Chandra entered, Cedric gave him a small smile, which Chandra returned.

"Mr. Rahasyamay! Good-o!" said Bagman happily, looking around at him. "Come in, come in, make yourself at home!"

Bagman looked somehow like a slightly overblown cartoon figure, standing amid all the pale-faced champions. He was wearing his old Wasp robes again.

"Well, now we're all here — time to fill you in!" said Bagman brightly. "When the audience has assembled, I'm going to be offering each of you this bag" — he held up a small sack of purple silk and shook it at them — "from which you will each select a small model of the thing you are about to face! There are different — er — varieties, you see. And I have to tell you something else too… ah, yes, your task is to _collect the golden egg_!"

Chandra and the others all nodded their understanding. Chandra was feeling pained by their scared and nervous energy, and concentrated on projecting his personal calm outward. It did not appear to be working, though.

Soon, Bagman was offering the sack of choices to Fleur Delacour.

She put a shaking hand inside the bag and drew out a tiny, perfect model of a dragon — a Welsh Green. It had the number three around its neck. Al – watching – knew, by the fact that Fleur showed no sign of surprise, but rather a determined resignation, that he had been right: Madame Maxime had told her what was coming.

Krum took a turn. He pulled out the blueish-gray Swedish Short-Snout, the number two tied around its neck. Chandra watched him look at it, determination in his eyes.

Next was Cedric. He pulled out the Hungarian Horntail, with a number one around its neck.

 _~Our luck is looking up, Sarcastic Defender.~_

Chandra ignored Al's incoherent mumbling, and reached in, pulling out the Chinese Fireball, a number 4 around its neck.

"Well, there you are!" said Bagman. "You have each pulled out the dragon you will face, and the numbers refer to the order in which you are to take on the dragons, do you see? Now, I'm going to have to leave you in a moment, because I'm commentating. Mr. Diggory, you're first, just go out into the enclosure when you hear a whistle, all right? Now Mr. Rahasyamay, could I have a quick word? Outside?"

"I suppose so," Chandra said, following him out.

"Feeling all right, Mr. Rahasyamay? Anything I can get you?"

"No. However," he said, taking his shoes off, and handing them to Bagman, "if you could hold these for me until after, I shall not be needing them."

"What? No no, I can't do that. You can't go in there barefoot!" Bagman protested, pushing the shoes back at him.

"Never mind, then," Chandra said, putting the shoes down on the ground.

"Anyway, what I meant is, got a plan?" said Bagman, lowering his voice conspiratorially. "Because I don't mind sharing a few pointers, if you'd like them, you know. I mean," Bagman continued, lowering his voice still further, "you're the underdog here, of course. Anything I can do to help?"

"You can hold my shoes for me, ensure they do not get stolen."

"Alright fine, I'll do it then," he said, taking the shoes. "But I mean, do you need any help with the Task?"

"I have a plan."

"Nobody would _know,_ Mr. Rahasyamay," said Bagman, winking at him.

"Unless you are suggesting that you and myself are nobody, then _we_ would know. The Sarcastic Defender is not above cheating to save our life, but we have multiple plans already. Thank you graciously for your offer, Mr. Bagman, but I doubt it will be necessary."

A whistle had blown somewhere.

"Good lord, I've got to run!" said Bagman in alarm, and he hurried off.

"What a strange, large, yellow man," Chandra commented aloud.

Chandra found a soft spot of grass, took a seated lotus position on it, and closed his eyes in meditation. Al tried to listen to what he could of the commentary for the other Champions, but Chandra was doing so well at meditating that Al couldn't hear anything but a dull sort of mumbling sound, and didn't snap out of his meditation until he heard Bagman call for 'Potter,' probably on the presumption that it was the name most people knew them by.

Standing up fluidly, Chandra walked barefoot through some trees, past an odd sort of rectangular metal doorway, and out into the arena. Across the way, he saw the Chinese Fireball. With two legs and two wings, it was scarlet and smooth scaled with a fringe of golden spikes around its snub-snouted face and had extremely protuberant eyes. It was shooting mushroom-shaped fireballs out of its nostrils as he watched.

Then he happened to look up, above the dragon, and noticed that the dragon enclosure and the stands for the crowd were all covered up under a very large, clear dome of enchanted glass.

 _ **Oh. Holy. Mother. Of. Crap,**_ Al thought in their head. _**We're doomed!**_

 _~Ah. The metal doorway was the entrance. Well, this is rather unfortunate,~_ Chandra thought. Al just spluttered at him, unable to form words in his upset.

Chandra shrugged, and filled his mind with a feeling of immense happiness, using what memories he could access from himself and Alastair, pointed his wand at the dragon, and cast his Patronus.

" _Expecto patronum_!"

The glowing silver Amazon river dolphin swam out of his wand and moved to one side of the dragon, the side farthest away from Chandra. As they did that, he got the oak wand out with his right hand and relinquished control of that arm to Al. As he did, he caught Bagman saying something about the Patronus.

 _~Cast your own Patronus, Al!~_

 _ **How? I'm facing down a dragon!**_

 _~You faced down dementors before. The worst that can happen here is we die. With dementors, we are destroyed utterly. Find your bravery!~_

Al grumbled but gritted his proverbial teeth and concentrated on a happy thought. He tried three or four times to cast the spell before it finally took.

" _Expecto patronum_!"

From the oak wand came a great long snake with three heads that slithered through the air to join Chandra's dolphin Patronus.

 _ **What the bloody Hell is**_ **that** _ **thing?**_

 _~No idea. Not important. Help me keep the dragon away from us!~_

" _Two_ Patronuses, everybody!" Bagman announced to the audience. "Potter cast _two_ Patronuses! And they're both different! One is a dolphin of some sort, and the other is a _runespoor_ , of all things!"

Chandra tried walking toward the golden egg, but as distracting as the Patronuses were, the Fireball kept looking at Chandra, who had to back off.

 _What's going on?_ Asked a long-missed voice in their head. _Holy shit, is that a dragon?_

 _ **About time you showed up, Adira. Quick, cast your Patronus!**_

 _What? Okay, I'll try._

Soon...

" _Three_ patronuses, ladies and gentleman! And this third one is... is that a wolf? Or just a very large dog?"

One by one, the others woke up and, as Chandra was still having a hard time getting to the egg, added their own patronuses. Joining the dolphin, the runespoor, and the dog were Iliana's Muggle Chinese dragon, a raven from Zoey, and Tier's was a jaguar.

"My _word,_ SIX patronuses?" Bagman shouted, as the crowd roared with delight.

Finally, under the combined distraction of six different patronuses, Chandra was able to run past the dragon and grab the golden egg, his river dolphin patronus winking out as he sheathed his wand to grab the egg and run. His timing was impeccable, for the dragon had finally figured out that the patronuses were harmless to it, and was turning around blowing fire at him, which he ducked just in time to escape through another door he'd only just spotted.

"Look at that!" Bagman was yelling. "Will you look at that! Our youngest champion is quickest to get his egg! Well, this is going to shorten the odds on Mr. Potter!"

From their new position safely away from the dragon, they witnessed the dragon keepers rushing forward to subdue the Chinese Fireball. Chandra was glad they hadn't needed to use the Conjunctivitis Curse, Al was so relieved he was giddy, and the others were all kind of dazed and confused. They had, from their perspective, gone to sleep in the Great Hall and woken up facing a dragon.

"That was excellent, Potter!" cried Professor McGonagall as he came into the sidelines — which from McGonagall was extravagant praise. Chandra noticed her hands were shaking, and took them in his own hands.

"Be calm, now, Professor. It is over. Deep breaths, now. Slow breaths, in, hold, and out."

It really said something of her mood that she went along with Chandra's directions without comment or even a glare.

"Yeh did it, you lot!" said Hagrid hoarsely. "Yeh did it! An' six patronuses, what a show o' power they'll not be wise to scoff at!"

Professor Moody came into view, his face very pale and damp with sweat. "That was... quite a display of power and skill, Potter. I don't think anyone's ever seen anything like that before."

"Quite," agreed Professor Lupin, former-DADA-teacher-cum-history-teacher. He also looked shaken. "Six patronuses, I believe that's one for the record books."

"Yes, well, there are six of us. Seven, if this 'Mother' that Chandra keeps talking about is what we think she is."

"So the others are back, now?"

"Yes. And I don't know about you, Chandra, but I could use a nap."

 _~Sounds good to me.~_

"Good. Zoey?"

With a very faint glow, they transformed into Zoey's form, Al and Chandra going to sleep for a nap. Zoey was dressed unusually, thanks to the addition of heart-shaped sunglasses and a very large pink feather boa around her neck. She walked around with her nose in the air, giving off a haughty demeanor, which was somewhat ruined by the fact she kept tripping because, as it turned out, she was trying to walk on the grass in high-heeled shoes that were much too big for her.

"Hullo, dahlinks," she said in a feigned hoity-toity accent. "Pray do tell me what the other peasants did to get past their dragons?"

"Sure thing. You were the best, you know, no competition. Cedric did this weird thing where he Transfigured a rock on the ground, turned it into a dog. He was trying to make the dragon go for the dog instead of him. Well, it was a pretty cool bit of Transfiguration, and it sort of worked, because he did get the egg, but he got burned as well — the dragon changed its mind halfway through and decided it would rather have him than the Labrador; he only just got away. And that Fleur girl tried this sort of charm, I think she was trying to put it into a trance — well, that kind of worked too, it went all sleepy, but then it snored, and this great jet of flame shot out, and her skirt caught fire — she put it out with a bit of water out of her wand. And Krum hit it with some sort of spell right in the eye."

"Conjunctivitis curse," Zoey supplied.

"Ah, okay. Anyway, it went trampling around in agony and squashed half the real eggs — they took marks off for that, he wasn't supposed to do any damage to them."

Zoey winced. Lapsing into her usual voice, she said, "Chandra isn't gonna like _that_."

"Yeah, probably. Anyway, they're about to call out the scores."

She sighed heavily, and turned to face the judges' box.

"It's marks out of ten from each one," Ron said, and Zoey, peering over her sunglasses up the field, saw the first judge — Madame Maxime — raise her wand in the air. What looked like a long silver ribbon shot out of it, which twisted itself into a large number 9.

" _Nine_? You were fastest to get the egg, and with no injuries or broken eggs! Why a 9?"

Mr. Alder was next. He shot a 10 into the air.

"Looking good," Ron said.

Dumbledore also put up a ten. The crowd was cheering harder than ever.

Ludo Bagman did a ten as well.

And now Karkaroff raised his wand. He paused for a moment, and then a number shot out of his wand too — a four.

" _What_?" Ron bellowed furiously. " _Four_? You lousy, biased scumbag, you gave Krum ten!"

"I guess we were just too much for him, and his brain collapsed in on itself from the strain," Zoey said casually.

"Er, are you one of the Potters?" asked Charlie Weasley.

Zoey held out a hand as though expecting him to kiss a ring, and said, "Yes, I am the esteemed Zoey Potter, esquire the first, at your disposable." This got her a number of giggles from the people around her.

"Er, okay. Well it looks like you lot got the highest score. Krum is in second."

"Indeed," said Zoey.

"Listen, I've got to run, I've got to go and send Mum an owl, I swore I'd tell her what happened — but that was unbelievable! Oh yeah — and they told me to tell you you've got to hang around for a few more minutes. … Bagman wants a word, back in the champions' tent."

She sighed again. "The burden of being me is great. I shall deign to speak to him again, the poor fame-addicted soul."

Ron and Hermione waited for her, too, as she went into the tent again (or for the first time, really, from her point of view).

Fleur, Cedric, and Krum all came in together. One side of Cedric's face was covered in a thick orange paste, which was presumably mending his burn. He grinned at Zoey when he saw her, then looked confused.

"Er, which one are you, again?"

"Zoey Potter," she said, holding her hand out as she had for Charlie. He shook it, and she sighed. Then giggled, but hastily pulled herself back into her faux condescending manner.

"Well, good one there. I heard about it while Madam Pomfrey was tending to my burns. Did you really cast six patronuses, and all of them different?"

Dropping her feigned attitude, she jumped up and down excitedly. "Yes we did! Each of us has our own patronus! Well the one called Mother might have one, too, but we're not even really sure she exists yet. Chandra keeps talking about her, though, as though she's real."

"Well done, _all_ of you!" said Ludo Bagman, bouncing into the tent and looking as pleased as though he personally had just got past a dragon. "By the way, here are Mr. Rahasyamay's shoes. Yes... Now, just a quick few words. You've got a nice long break before the second task, which will take place at half past nine on the morning of February the twenty-fourth — but we're giving you something to think about in the meantime! If you look down at those golden eggs you're all holding, you will see that they open … see the hinges there? You need to solve the clue inside the egg — because it will tell you what the second task is, and enable you to prepare for it! All clear? Sure? Well, off you go, then!"

Wasting no time, Zoey turned the latch and opened the egg, which started to wail and screech. She shut it hastily.

"What the bloody heckadoodle was _that_?" she exclaimed.

"You'll have to figure that out to discover what the next Task is," Bagman said, and left.

Zoey sighed, and turned Chandra's shoes into bracelets and put them on before grabbing the golden egg in both arms and leaving toward the school.

Looking as dignified as she could while hugging a great big golden egg to carry it and occasionally tripping on her shoes, she came out of the tent, rejoined Ron and Hermione, and they started to walk back around the edge of the forest, talking hard; Zoey wanted to hear what the other champions had done in more detail. Then, as they rounded the clump of trees behind which they had first heard the dragons roar, a witch leapt out from behind them.

It was Rita Skeeter. She was wearing acid-green robes today; the Quick-Quotes Quill in her hand blended perfectly against them.

"Congratulations, Potter!" she said, beaming at Zoey. "I wonder if you could give me a quick word? How you felt facing that dragon? How you feel _now,_ about the fairness of the scoring?"

Zoey paused, staring at the woman for a moment, then handed Ron the golden egg and turned back to face Rita. She put her fake hoity-toity demeanor back on and tossed her slipping feather boa back over her shoulder.

"I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone," she said. "At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their str-"

"What is that rubbish?" Rita Skeeter interrupted.

"Don't like it? What about this? 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.'"

"Is this some sort of weird Muggle nonsense?" Skeeter asked.

"Tut tut. You're British! Witch or not, you should have recognized Churchill at least. I don't blame you not knowing the Gettysberg Address, which is what that 'four score and seven years' bit was. But honestly, you should be ashamed of yourself, not knowing Churchill!"

"Churchill? What was he, some Muggle entertainer?"

"He was Prime Minister of the country during World War II!"

Skeeter stared at her blankly, confused.

"World War II? You don't know about that? It was this huge war the Muggles were having about the same time as Grindelwald was banging about in Europe. You don't know about that? And you call yourself a journalist? Well good _day_ to you!" she said, going back toward the school in a huff.

"Oh come on, stop with this nonsense. Can't you please just give me a word about the First Task?"

"Sure you can have a word: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!" Zoey shouted back at Skeeter.

After the fifth time she tripped on her high-heeled shoes, she took them off and carried them in her hands as she went barefoot back up to the school.

"Hey Hermione," she said when they were far enough away from Skeeter, "do you recognize this sound?" Zoey reached over, popped open the egg and released its screechy wailing. Both her friends clapped their hands over their ears, Ron dropping the egg.

Soon Zoey had it closed again and the egg back in Ron's arms. Ron did not look pleased by that.

"Good lord, that was awful!" Hermione said.

"Yes yes, but do you know what it _is_?"

"Hmm... well it could be a code. It reminded me a little of my parents' modem when it dials the Internet. But wizards don't have computers, so I don't know how one would go about decoding it. Of course, it could be an actual language instead."

"I'm gonna ask Lupin about it. He knows lots of creatures and stuff."

"Yes, Zoey, but he's a teacher."

"He's also Sirius's friend. Which makes him like an uncle. I can butter him up, convince him to tell me. Or I could ask Moody; he was gonna give help for the dragons."

"He shouldn't be doing that, he's a teacher!"

"Yeah and we didn't choose this, we're in it to survive. We'll take any help we can get to survive this."

Hermione couldn't find an argument against that, apparently.

Taking this attitude to heart, it seemed, Zoey would grab the egg and open it for everyone she came across, asking if they recognized it. This ended in Zoey running to escape Filch's ire at making so much noise in the corridors. Zoey, Ron, and Hermione soon made it into the Griffindor common room.

When they entered the Gryffindor common room it exploded with cheers and yells again. There were mountains of cakes and flagons of pumpkin juice and butterbeer on every surface; Lee Jordan had let off some Filibuster's Fireworks, so that the air was thick with stars and sparks; and Dean Thomas, who was very good at drawing, had put up some impressive new banners, most of which depicted Chandra shooting six patronuses at a Chinese Fireball dragon, though a couple showed Cedric with his head on fire.

Zoey grabbed a tablecloth off a table and used it as a knapsack to carry the egg in, where she kept irritating people by making the egg screech and wail after asking them if they recognized the sound. She got different answers, including 'banshee' and 'Percy Weasley singing in the shower,' but she didn't think those were likely. It also sounded a little like a musical saw, like at Nick's deathday party.

The worst part of this was when she started just staring into the emptiness of the egg, seemingly oblivious to the screechy wailing. She was feeling inside it, trying to work out clues. At that point, Ron took the egg away from her and told her she could have it back later. She spent the next hour turning snack food into spiders – goofy little spiders with smiley faces and not terribly realistic – and putting them on Ron's clothes, which cracked up the twins and Lee Jordan whenever Ron would yowl and flail around in terror, but this eventually drove Ron up to his room. After this, she enlisted Fred to retrieve the golden egg and she opened it again.

"SHUT IT!" Seamus roared, chucking a bottle of butterbeer at her.

He ended up knocking a punch bowl over right into the open egg. The sound was immediately muted, but something else was coming from the egg. She couldn't hear it very well, but it sounded somewhat like a comprehensible language. Curious, Zoey carried the egg up the stairs with a Wingardium Leviosa spell, dumped the punch into the sink, then set the closed egg aside as she filled the bathtub.

Once it was full, she opened the egg and pushed it into the water, filling it. She heard what sounded like faint singing. Stripping out of her clothes, she jumped into the tub and put her head under the water.

" _Come seek us where our voices sound,_

 _We cannot sing above the ground,_

 _And while you're searching ponder this:_

 _We've taken what you'll sorely miss,_

 _Two hours long you'll have to look,_

 _And to recover what we took,_

 _Around obstacles, past creature guards,_

 _Whirlpools and magic wards,_

 _But past two hours — the prospect's black,_

 _Too late, it's gone, it won't come back_."

She came up for air, summoned a parchment and quill and ink, and wrote down the riddle. She had to go back under the water several times to get it all, but finally she did.

A few minutes later, a soaking-wet Zoey, her robe on backwards and wet, came down looking for Hermione. When she found her friend, Zoey dragged her up to their room and showed her the parchment she'd written the riddle on.

"Sounds like someone's going to take something you have to get back. And if the egg can only be understood underwater..." Hermione checked her watch. "I'll be right back, gotta run to the library to confirm my suspicion."

"Okie dokie," Zoey said.

While she waited for her bookish friend to return, Zoey used her magic to dry herself off, though she left the water in the tub in case Hermione wanted to hear the song, too.

Less than half an hour passed when Hermione returned, a book in her hands.

"Mermish!" she said.

"Mermaids?"

"Mermish. It's the language of the mer-people. Let's see... yes, there are mer-people in Scotland. Specifically, the selkies. I wonder if you have to go into the lake?"

Zoey's face wrinkled up in disbelief. "In February? For a Triwizard task? How's anyone supposed to see us when we're down there? The Black Lake is called that for a _reason_."

"Unless you think they're going to go to Ireland or Greece to find merrow or sirens, the Black Lake would make the most sense. I don't know how that would make a spectator sport either, but what else could it be?"

"And they're gonna steal something precious and we have to get it back?"

"That's what the song said, right?"

"Yes."

"Then it must be."

"But what's so precious I would go into the lake after it? I mean, I suppose they could take Iliana's Firebolt, but putting that in the water might ruin it."

"Hmm... I don't know, either. But for now, we should focus on how you're going to go down there."

Zoey shrugged. "I'll just have Tier change us to something that can breathe underwater and still use a wand. It'll be easy for him. It'll probably look really freakish, but whatever works."

"What will you do when you find whatever it is you have to rescue?"

"That's a good question. Does that book teach mermish? How do you say 'Hand it over, you soggy goons' in mermish?"

"No, this book does not teach mermish, and I don't think it would be a good idea to insult the mer-people, Zoey."

"Well maybe I can learn 'Please give me the thing you took, kind persons' in mermish. Now I know what to look for, I can raid the library later. Anyway, going back to the party now."

Zoey took off running, padding barefoot down into the party again.

Ron was sulking in his bed when Zoey came into his room carrying a tray full of food.

"Sorry about the spiders. I was put off with you, but I shouldn't'a did that. It was mean, and I'm sorry. I brought you some food from the party."

Ron sighed, smiling wanly. "Thank you. Apology accepted. Oooh, custard cream."

He bit into a custard cream and swallowed. Then suddenly he was covered in yellow feathers. Zoey fell down laughing, thankfully having put the tray down beforehand.

"Har har. One of Fred and George's trick sweets, am I right?"

"Yeah. I really am sorry about the spiders, though. Should I prank the twins to get back at em for laughing at you?"

"If you want to try, you can," Ron said as his feathers began to molt.

"Goody. I'll let you know when I have something." Then she got a thoughtful look in her eye, and began giggling.

"You've thought of something, haven't you?"

"Possibly. I don't know if it's possible, yet. I'll have to practice upstairs later. For now, let's eat."

She took a canary cream and swallowed it whole, then ran downstairs again, leaping down half the stairs effortlessly. Ron rushed to follow, and spotted her turn into a canary in front of the twins and Lee Jordan, to great laughter.

The next morning, Ron was at breakfast with the twins and Hermione. Zoey was nowhere to be seen. So he chatted with the twins about the First Task and how well the Potters did against the dragon.

Halfway through the twins telling a joke, everyone's attention turned to the entrance of the Great Hall.

"Fred and George Weasley!" came Mrs. Weasley's voice, loud and angry.

The twins turned, horrified. Their mother was standing in the doorway, looking cross.

"Mum? What are you doing here?"

Mrs. Weasley put her fists on her hips and glared at them. Hermione, though, thought something was off about her. She wasn't moving from her place by the door, and she looked a little shaky.

"Don't you fake innocence, boys! You know full well what you did!"

"But... but... we didn't to anything _this_ bad?"

" _This_ bad? You mean bad enough for me to come here in perf... person, and... hold on..."

She shifted herself around, like something was out of place, then went back to glaring at the twins. But then, her head turned into an acorn squash and fell off, rolling away. Her arms turned into a broken-off tree branch and a mop. Then the rest of the facade fell over in a clatter of buckets and brushes, rope and sofa cushions, all wrapped up in an excellent copy of Mrs. Weasley's usual clothing.

Everyone froze. Then the room exploded in laughter and applause at the brilliant joke. Zoey came out from the other side of the entrance and bowed theatrically.

"Thank you, thank you. You're too kind."

Even the twins were laughing by now.

"Brilliant joke, Zoey! You sure had us for a while. That's some impressive transfiguration, by the way. You actually made a pile of stuff look and act like Mum! We'll have to write home about it; Mum will get a kick out of us getting pranked like that!"

"Ms. Potter," said a stern voice. She looked up at Professor McGonagall.

"Yes?" Zoey asked, smiling sweetly and innocently up at the professor.

"Ten points from Griffindor for disrupting breakfast with your shenannigans," she said. "And you will clear up this mess or it will be twenty, am I understood?"

"Yes ma'am right away professor," Zoey said, scooping the things into her arms and calling Dobby. When he appeared, she shoved the things into his arms.

"Thanks for your help, Dobby. Here, take this stuff back, I'll get the rest of it myself."

Professor McGonagall hadn't left, yet. She stood in the doorway as Zoey tried to leave with her own large pile of things, which was so tall she couldn't really see where she was going.

"Was there something else, Professor?"

"Yes. Fifteen points _to_ Griffindor, Ms. Potter, for pulling one over on the Weasley twins."

Zoey laughed and thanked the professor, who let her go about clearing up. The twins came over and helped her, so she wouldn't run into things and get into more trouble.

"Again, that was impressive. We loved it!"

"Thanks, Fred. I could've made it last longer, but I forgot that moving it makes it harder to maintain. I should've left it still once I got it inside the room. When I made it move its arm, it was one thing too many and it all fell apart."

"You did that whole thing with your wandless magic?" George asked.

"Yes. I had to get Dobby's help to find enough stuff to transfigure. He also helped me move it. Cast some kinda spell on me so it would move when I did. But as you saw, the transfigurations were unstable."

"Well yeah. It's well past fourth year magic, that. And it must have been a drain on your magic keeping it going."

"Yeah, I could do with a little more food, come to that. But breakfast will be done by the time I get done putting this stuff back. Good thing I had some sandwiches beforehand. Being friends with house elves has its uses."

"How'd you mimic her voice?"

"Oh that's not hard when you've got Tier. He changed my voice box for me."

"Wow. So you could talk like her anytime?"

"Yes. But it's not easy. Took ten whole minutes to get it done right. Luckily, going back to normal is a matter of seconds."

After her prank of the twins, Zoey switched over to Iliana's version of the body, because Iliana had been getting strangely insistent about having facetime. One of the first things she did when she was Out was find Luna, and talk with the odd blond girl. She found Luna in a corridor on her way somewhere from her common room.

"Luna! Hi, I've missed you lately."

"You missed me? Really?"

"Yes. You're a friend. And I've been gone since Halloween."

"Ah yes. Chandra took your place. He... or she? Chandra is nice."

"What? Oh yeah, I remember now. Thank goodness for the Common Memory."

"How _is_ Chandra?" Luna asked.

"He's quiet. I think he got very tired out by being Out all the time by himself, then with Al."

"Ah, I see. Well tell him thank you for me, for helping me find my things."

"Have, er... have your things been staying put?"

"Oh, for now they are. But I think they might start vanishing again soon."

"Yeah, Chandra isn't very intimidating. You'll tell me at once if your things start going missing again, won't you?"

"I don't want to trouble you, Iliana."

"It's not a bother, or a burden, or a trouble. I _like_ helping you. And bullies who get away with stuff tend to escalate, to see how much they can get away with. I want to shut that sort of thing down as fast as possible. Not only for your sake, but for others as well."

Something in Luna's eyes looked briefly worried, which her empathic sense confirmed. "No, it's fine. It'll be fine."

"You're worried about retribution?"

Luna said nothing.

"You are. I can feel it. Empath, remember?"

Luna sighed. "Yes."

"And you were lying about them not bothering you?" Iliana guessed.

Again, Luna said nothing.

"Hmm... well, I think I have an idea that will help you with your things and hopefully won't cause you any more trouble. You have a trunk, right?"

Luna nodded.

"Well I can ask Professor Lupin and Sirius about getting your trunk warded so only you can get into it. Then as long as you keep your things in your trunk, they'll stay there."

"Do you think they can make wards good enough to keep out even seventh-year Ravenclaws taking Arithmancy and Ancient Runes?"

"Godfather Sirius and two of his friends figured out how to become Animagi in their fifth year at Hogwarts, and made a functional map of the castle that shows everyone's location, also while in school."

Luna stared, wide-eyed, at Iliana. "They did that? Really? Can I see it?"

"Er, yeah. I brought it with me so I could avoid Snape, and to make sure we wouldn't be bothered in here."

She pulled the Marauders Map out of a pocket, opened it up, and activated it. Luna giggled at the pass-phrase. But then she gasped in wonder at the Map's ink lines spreading out and showing where everyone was.

"That is _amazing_ , Iliana."

"I know. I love looking at it. Anyway, let's get out of the corridor. Here, this unused classroom is available."

She took Luna's hand, feeling an odd feeling in her chest as she did, and the two ducked into the room. Iliana sealed the door and warded it to keep out ghosts and poltergeists, as well as putting up a silencing ward.

"Oh, now these desks won't do. Zoey?"

She set the Map down on a desk and Zoey came Out long enough to turn a different desk into a loveseat. She was sweating when she was done, but didn't comment before switching back to Iliana.

"Wow, she's talented. She made a loveseat without a wand."

"Yeah, she's good at that kinda thing. Oh, and Zoey tells me she couldn't make it any bigger. It's only going to last an hour as it is."

"Oh. Well, that's fine." Luna sat down. "Are you sitting down, too?"

Iliana nodded, smiling, and sat down next to Luna. She reached over for the Map and the two girls examined it.

"Snape is in his office," Iliana pointed out. "And-what's this? Why is Mr. Crouch in Moody's office?"

"Who's Mr. Crouch?"

"He's the former head of the international magical cooperation thingy at the ministry, before Mr. Alder took over."

"You don't seem to like either of them very much."

"Yeah, well, Crouch was the one who put Sirius in prison without a trial. He got fired for it, once Sirius's name was cleared. But I still don't like him. And Mr. Alder is a creeper. He was eyeing me like forbidden candy when we met at the World Cup over the summer."

"Oh. Yes, you're right to be wary of him, then. He might be a member of the Rotfang Conspiracy."

"What's that?"

"Oh, they're a conspiracy infiltrating the Ministry. They want to take over the world through a mix of espionage and tooth decay. Mr. Alder probably wants to feed you candy so your teeth rot."

Iliana snorted with suppressed laughter. "I'm sure he wants to give me candy, alright, but not to rot my teeth."

"What do you mean?"

"Never mind. I'm probably being paranoid."

"Paranoia can be a survival trait. Look at Moody."

Iliana's nose wrinkled. "I'll look at him as little as possible, thanks. I know he can't help looking like that, but neither can I help not wanting to look at his disfigured face too much. Not that I'd ever tell anyone else that, least of all him. But Al thinks his face is interesting to look at. Al has a strange sense of aesthetics."

"You know, if you're worried Mr. Alder might... hurt you, or whatever... I'll help you. You're such a good friend, I want to be a good friend for you, too."

"Oh, I don't really think he's going to do anything. He just gives me the creeps. Anyway, let's change the subject, okay?"

"Sure, Iliana. So, this map... I wonder how it's made."

They spent the rest of the hour sitting there, Luna trying to work out how it was made. It turned out she was in Arithmancy and Ancient Runes, but being it was her first year, she didn't know enough magic to analyze the Map. So she mostly speculated instead. It turned out that Luna had been studying Ancient Runes for a good many years with her father, but it was the Arithmancy that provided tools for analyzing and reverse-engineering spells and runes. If either girl had known how to reveal the runes of the map, Luna would probably have the thing half figured out before dinnertime. But they didn't.

Iliana liked talking with Luna so much, and had felt so bad about neglecting her younger friend for so long, that she insisted on being Out on Saturdays at least. But Al and Adira also wanted to be Out, so to avoid fights, they began to alternate. Al got Sundays and Mondays, Adira got Tuesdays and Wednesdays, while Iliana got Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, though of the three, she was flexible about Thursday and Friday, but wouldn't budge on Saturdays, which she spent with Luna. Al, for his part, used his Sundays to spend time with Javier, and Adira just wanted to spend time with Ron and Hermione.

It had gotten to be such a regular thing that Luna and Iliana started meeting in the same unused classroom every Saturday. Outside was too cold, after all, neither of their common rooms was an option, and the library was not a good place for talking. Zoey was always willing to turn a couple desks into a loveseat for them to sit in, and after a few tries, managed to get it to last for a few hours before it reverted back into desks.

Javier and Al, on the other hand, spent time in the Great Hall, generally at the Griffindor table. There weren't many places to hang out with friends or lovers in the school, and they didn't want to appropriate Luna's and Iliana's space with their romantic shenannigans. Besides which, Al had come on too strong before, and both he and Javier were stepping back, getting to know each other better.

Iliana did indeed talk to Remus and Sirius about warding for Luna's trunk, and during the second week of December, the two men waited in Remus's classroom for Dobby to bring Luna's trunk to them to ward, as Iliana and Luna watched. When they were done, Luna's trunk would refuse access to anyone but herself, and there were clever and painful but otherwise harmless hexes that would punish anyone trying to break in. The more clever the intrusions, the more painful the punishments would get, so that nobody but Remus or Sirius would be able to undo the wards. Well, them or Dumbledore or someone else of that power and skill level. But seventh-year Arithmancy and Ancient Runes students, even Ravenclaws, would be in the hospital wing getting extensive spell damage fixed before they broke into Luna's trunk.

Iliana had never seen Luna as happy as she was when she cooed over her improved trunk, and showered the three of them with thanks. And Luna's happiness made Iliana beam with glee at how much good she'd done for her friend.

End note: I had so many ideas for the First Task I honestly didn't know which one was going to be used, and then this idea came out of left field. I like it. It establishes something I've long known was possible for them, without going overboard like some of my ideas would have done.

Endnote two: Zoey's use of the word "disposable" instead of "disposal" was deliberate, not a mistake.


	29. House-Elves, Occlumency, and Weird Magic

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 29"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Twenty-nine: House-Elves, Occlumency, and Weird Magic**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}.__ _And now_ _ _~Chandra.~__

 _ **Note 4:**_ __ _I should've been saying this all along, but this is fan fiction, no money is made off it. All hail the mighty J. K. Rowling, Goddess of Harry Potter._

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

In early December, the weather started to become windy with lots of sleet, and that's what it was doing during one Care of Magical Creatures class. Luckily, with all the skrewts dead, Hagrid was teaching them about porlocks now, short little bipedal horse-like creatures covered in shaggy fur.

"They guard horses, see. An they're pretty mistrustful of humans. They can bite, just like horses, so be careful," Hagrid instructed.

Al was squatting in front of one, which was looking up at him with narrowed eyes.

"Magic is bloody weird," Al said. "Some of these magical creatures don't make any sense at all."

"Whadda ya mean?" Ron asked.

"Well like this thing. It's only, what, two feet tall at best? How exactly does it act as a guardian to horses? Horses are taller than humans, usually, and with those hooves, they can look after themselves pretty well. What do they need porlocks for? What's this tiny little thing supposed to be able to do? I mean, it has hands, but why? What good are you, little porlock?"

As though in answer, the porlock glared at him and whinnied loudly, then started running at Al. Al started to laugh, but then the porlock grabbed him by the robes and threw him a good ten feet away, where Al fell in a heap with lots of cussing. The Slytherins burst out laughing at him.

He managed to get standing again, brushing grass out of his hair and clothes. Seeing he was alright, the Griffindors added to the laughter.

"I suppose I deserved that," Al said.

"Well, well, well … this _does_ look like fun."

Al groaned, and looked over at none other than Rita Skeeter. Ron and Hermione glared at her.

"Who're you?" Hagrid asked her.

"Rita Skeeter, _Daily Prophet_ reporter," Rita replied, beaming at him. Her gold teeth glinted.

"Thought Dumbledore said you weren' allowed inside the school anymore," said Hagrid, frowning slightly.

Rita acted as though she hadn't heard what Hagrid had said.

"Ah, porlocks. How well I remember them. Oh, and Harry," she said, spotting Al's scar. "So you like Care of Magical Creatures, do you? One of your favorite lessons?"

"My name is Alistair, you wretched woman," he said.

At this, her face fell a little into worry, but then she recovered herself.

"Yes, Alistair, I remember you now. I just didn't recognize you. You look just like your godfather. Or is he your father?"

"No, he isn't my father. He's quite adamant about that. And remember that Adira looked like James back when she thought she was a boy. It's not possible to have two genetic fathers, so I don't know why I look like Sirius. Glad to see you remember my name now, though."

"Yes, yes, but you didn't answer my first questions. Is Care of Magican Creatures one of your favorite lessons?"

"Yes," he said stoutly. Hagrid beamed at him.

"Lovely," said Rita. "Really lovely. Been teaching long?" she added to Hagrid.

"This is o'ny me second year," said Hagrid.

"Lovely… I don't suppose you'd like to give an interview, would you? Share some of your experience of magical creatures? I've heard some interesting rumors about this class. For instance, about a creature called, er... what were they now? Bang ended scoots?"

"Blast-ended skrewts," Hagrid said. "They're all dead now, though."

He glanced at Al, no doubt thinking of Chandra, but Hagrid had done as Chandra asked and wasn't treating any of _them_ different for Chandra's actions.

"What a pity," she said. "But you could describe them to me, could you not? The _Prophet_ does a zoological column every Wednesday, as I'm sure you know. We could feature those bang-ended scoots as a sort of memorial for them? And then you can tell me all about them, like where they come from. I'm sure I've never heard of them before."

Al noticed a dull red flush rising up out of Hagrid's wild black beard, and his heart sank. Where _had_ Hagrid got the skrewts from? He knew from Chandra that they were a hybrid of fire crabs and manticores, but surely Hagrid wouldn't be fool enough to illegally create an experimental breed?

"Not much point to it now," Al said. "They're all dead, and Hagrid doesn't need any reminders of that painful memory."

"Ah yes, so true, so true. But it's still up to Hagrid, of course."

"Yes, I suppose it is."

"And you, Alistair, weren't you the one who killed poor Hagrid's scoots?"

"That was Chandra."

Her face lit up. "Oh really? The, er... I mean, one of the voices in your head?"

"Are you trying to dig dirt on me for an article about how I'm crazy? I know what you think of us, Rita. You called me a 'foul little mutant' at the wand-weighing ceremony. No thanks, I have enough of people thinking I'm crazy."

"I wouldn't do that, Alistair. I just want to get to know you, and understand you. Yes, I said something mean in anger that day, but I didn't really mean it. Just like I'm sure you didn't mean to call me a small and insignificant insect."

"Of course I did, Rita _Skeeter_. Honestly, you're still upset over that? You must have gotten teased about your name loads of time in school, how could that have been new to you?"

She blinked, confused, then looked thoughtful. After a few moments, she cracked a wide grin, like a Cheshire cat with gold teeth.

"I see now, Alistair. Bugging me with insect puns because of my _name_. How sophomoric of you."

"What, are you stupid, that that wasn't immediately what came to mind? Though there's another meaning for it that fits; you really _are_ something small and annoying to me, Rita, just like an insect."

"Oh now, Mr. Potter, we need not be enemies. I could be your best friend, make you look great to the world. It hurts that you don't like me. Just give me an interview, please? Then you'll see that I'm worth a second chance."

"Tempting, really, but I know your reputation, and that 'mutant' comment still bugs me. You don't know how to tell the truth, and you always have something nasty to say about everyone. Even your compliments are back-handed."

"Ah. Well aren't you the tough nut to crack? Anyway," she said, turning back to Hagrid, "what about that interview about the scoots?"

"Blast-Ended Skrewts," Hagrid said eagerly. "Er — yeah, why not?"

"Lovely. Well goodbye, Alistair!" Rita Skeeter called merrily to him as he set off with Ron and Hermione. "Until Friday night, then, Hagrid!"

"She'll twist everything he says," Al said. "She always does."

"Just as long as he didn't import those skrewts illegally or anything," said Hermione desperately. They looked at one another — it was exactly the sort of thing Hagrid might do.

"Hagrid's been in loads of trouble before, and Dumbledore's never sacked him," said Ron consolingly. "And anyway, Dumbledore already knows the truth about what the skrewts were."

"Yes, but I don't want the whole world to know, in case it gets Hagrid in trouble." He frowned.

Later, in double Divination that afternoon, Al was confused but glad that Trelawney seemed to be avoiding him for whatever reason, rather than making more dire pronouncements of his death.

"I'm glad we didn't get homework," Ron said. "I hope Hermione got loads off Professor Vector, I love not working when she is."

But Hermione wasn't at dinner, nor was she in the library when they went to look for her afterward. The only person in there was Viktor Krum. Ron hovered behind the bookshelves for a while, watching Krum, debating in whispers with Al whether he should ask for an autograph — but then Ron realized that six or seven girls were lurking in the next row of books, debating exactly the same thing, and he lost his enthusiasm for the idea.

"Just bloody ask him already! He gets asked all the time, I'm sure he's used to it by now."

"But he's _famous!_ "

"And so am I. What's your point?"

"Well that's different. He's older, and he's famous for, you know-"

"Actually _doing_ something worth being famous over," Al interrupted, "as opposed to being famous for something his _mother_ did?"

"Er, yeah. I guess."

They didn't find out where Hermione was until she caught them just before getting to the Fat Lady's portrait.

"Al!" she panted, skidding to a halt beside him. "Glad I caught you. I found my way into the kitchens!"

Ron perked up at this. "You found the kitchens? You can get in?"

"Yeah, wanna join me down there?"

Al, grinning inwardly with his suspicion about what this was about, said, "Yeah, Ron, let's go down. We can get extra pudding."

"Excellent! Hermione, lead the way."

'Thank you,' mouthed Hermione at Al. Al mouthed back 'You're welcome.'

They made their way down the marble staircase into the entrance hall, following Hermione. She turned left at the bottom of the staircase and hurried toward the door through which Cedric Diggory had gone the night after the Goblet of Fire had regurgitated their names. Al had never been through here before. He and Ron followed Hermione down a flight of stone steps, but instead of ending up in a gloomy underground passage like the one that led to Snape's dungeon, they found themselves in a broad stone corridor, brightly lit with torches, and decorated with cheerful paintings that were mainly of food.

Finally, they ended up at a picture of a still life of a bowl of fruit. Hermione stretched out her forefinger, and tickled the huge green pear. It began to squirm, chuckling, and suddenly turned into a large green door handle. She seized it, pulled the door open, and they followed her inside.

Inside was an enormous, high-ceilinged room, large as the Great Hall above it, with mounds of glittering brass pots and pans heaped around the stone walls, and a great brick fireplace at the other end.

"Alastair Potter sir!" a voice from somewhere around his navel said, and he looked down.

" _Dobby?_ " he said in amazement.

"Um, yes sir. Is sir not remembering Dobby is here?"

"What? You work here now?"

 _~It is the small green North Star,~_ Chandra said in his head. _~The North Star who guided me in my lonesome time.~_

Hermione opened her mouth to speak, but Al talked first. "Oh yeah, Chandra recognizes you. But he didn't remember you when he was here by himself earlier, so he didn't count you as really any more significant than the other house elves. And since he'd never seen a house elf before, he didn't know your clothing was strange for house elves."

Dobby's clothes were indeed weird. He had done an even worse job of dressing himself than the wizards at the World Cup. He was wearing a tea cozy for a hat, on which he had pinned a number of bright badges; a tie patterned with horseshoes over a bare chest, a pair of what looked like children's soccer shorts, and odd socks, one of which was the black one Al and the gang had used to trick the abusive Malfoy into freeing Dobby. The other was covered in pink and orange stripes.

"How are you, Dobby?"

"Dobby is well, sir. Dobby is come to Hogwarts looking for work, and Professor Dumbledore is paying Dobby, sir!"

The house-elves all around the kitchen, who had been listening and watching with interest, all looked away at these words, as though Dobby had said something rude and embarrassing.

"Sounds like something Dumbledore would do. Is he paying the other house elves, too?"

No doubt about it, the other house elves were looking very offended.

"No, Mr. Potter sir, he is not. Most house elves does not get paid, sir. They considers it a great offense to even suggest it. House elves likes work, even Dobby is liking work sir. But Dobby is... unusual for a house elf, sir. Dobby is preferring to be paid, sir, so Dobby can quit whenever he needs to, sir. Dobby is not wanting to be trapped with bad, mean, evil masters again."

Something came over Dobby, and Al grabbed him before he could punish himself.

"You don't have to do that anymore, Dobby. They're not your masters anymore."

"Thank you, sir. It is taking Dobby a long time to get over that habit, sir. Dobby is being the Malfoy's elf for decades, sir. All Dobby's life he is serving the Malfoys, but no more."

"How old _are_ you, Dobby?" Ron asked.

"Dobby is 60 years old, sir."

"You're _60?_ "

"Yes, Mr. Ronald Weasley, sir. House elves is living a very long time. House elves is getting as old as 150, sir, just like wizards! Only we is not showing our age, sirs and miss, until we is in our 120's."

"That's amazing, Dobby! I would have guessed you were no older than your teens."

Dobby chuckled. "Yes, house elves is often thought of as very young, sir. We is small and we is very different from humans, sir."

"So, Dobby," Hermione started. "You say house elves don't want payment. What _do_ they want?"

"Most house elves is just wanting work, respect, kindness, and compliments on their work, miss. Most of us is not minding being servants to wizards, miss. We is getting housing, food, work, uniforms," he said, referring to the spotlessly clean tea towels the other house elves were all wearing, which bore the Hogwarts crest, "and we is getting safety from the many creatures that eat elves, miss."

" _Eat you_? But you have magic!"

"Yes, miss, eat us. We has magic, yes, but... well... Dobby's teacher elf is saying years ago when Dobby is young, that we house elves was bred from wild elves. Wild elves did not have so much magic as us, and they was not as smart as us. Wizards is making us from them, making us more magical, making us smart, and binding us to them, but we is not minding. They made us, and they is supposed to protect us. Most wizards is doing that, in fact.

"There is being more," he continued. "Even with our magic, living in the wild is hard. Dobby is living out in the wild for 2 years before he is finding work here, sirs and miss, and Dobby is not having fun with that. It is being a long and hard time, very difficult. Dobby is almost getting eaten many times, sirs and miss. Most elves is not wanting to do it. But Dobby is being through worse in his life, sirs and miss. Dobby is doing it all over again if he has to, sirs and miss."

Hermione nodded. "Thank you, Dobby. I'm going to talk with the other elves. I believe you, but it's always good to speak with others, in case they tell me something you forgot, or have something to add that you wouldn't have been aware of from your experiences. See you!" she waved and took off to talk with another house elf.

Dobby, Al, and Ron sat around, talking, with Dobby occasionally bringing them snacks or drinks. Al decided he wouldn't come here too often, to avoid ending up like Dudley from all the delicious food the house elves lavished on any witch or wizard clever enough to find the kitchens. The things Dobby told him about house elves were amazing, and he knew that he'd have to compare notes with Hermione in case the others didn't tell her the same things.

One of these things he told them in response to seeing the Marauder's Map. Al had been curious as to why elves didn't show up on the map, and Dobby had been fascinated by the map. According to Dobby, there was a huge part of the castle that was missing from the map, which according to him was the house-elf quarters, where all the elves and their children slept. And there were no child elves in the kitchens because elves didn't have to start working until they were 10, which was their equivalent of 17 or 18.

And after Al mentioned that the Chamber of Secrets wasn't on the map, Dobby changed the subject and showed him another room that wasn't on the map.

"Right here, on the seventh floor, sir, across from the tapestry of the dancing trolls. We is calling it the come-and-go room, or else the Room of Requirement. It is becoming anything you is needing, and you is just needing to walk back and forth three times thinking what you is needing the whole time."

"That's brilliant, Dobby!" Al said, already pondering the possibilities for himself and Javier. They were still taking it easy, getting to know each other after their rather impassioned beginning, but it would make a nice place to have a private chat when necessary. He even felt Iliana's interest in the room perk up.

"Yeah, that's amazing!" Ron agreed.

"What's amazing?" Hermione asked, having returned from talking with the other elves.

They told her, in turns, about what Dobby had said. Hermione didn't seem so sure, thinking it was some mad idea of Dobby's, but when she talked to the other elves again, they confirmed the room's existence and purpose.

"Wow, that would be really useful. The things you could do there," she said, thinking. "Dueling practice, summon a swimming pool to practice for the second task, maybe conjure a library full of cool books, especially Defense books... the possibilities are potentially endless!"

"Be a bit more roomy than a broom closet, too," Ron said, sniggering.

"Oh like _you'd_ know, Ronald!"

"Hey, just cuz I haven't doesn't mean I couldn't!"

"I really don't want to know. Really _really_ do not want to know. Changing the subject now, you really should practice swimming, Al. With what you've told me of the Dursleys, I doubt they ever gave you swimming lessons."

"Too true. They would have wanted me to drown. I just wonder how I'd get lessons?"

"Well _I_ know how to swim," Hermione said. "I don't _like_ to, because it makes my hair poof into a giant ball of fuzz when it dries, but I could."

"If you'd rather not, maybe I could find someone else."

"I know how to swim, mate."

"Yeah, but I doubt you'd make a good teacher, Ron."

Ron looked thoughtful, then shrugged. "That's fair."

The next day being Tuesday, they woke up as Adira. The day was normal for her, until dinnertime, when she got a message from Dumbledore to meet him in his office after dinner.

So, standing before the gargoyle, she said, "Malted milk balls," which was the password. She briefly imagined Snape saying passwords like that, and giggled at the mental image.

She barely had her hand to the door when Dumbledore said, "Come on in, Adira."

Shrugging, she opened the door, closed it behind her, and went over to sit in front of Dumbledore's desk.

"You asked to see me, Professor?"

"Indeed I did, Adira. What I have to say is fairly serious, too. No, you aren't in any trouble. It's about the horcruxes, and Voldemort."

"What about them?"

"I have been growing concerned for some time, I admit. The signs are not looking good. I fear Trelawney's prediction last year may be coming true soon. I fear Voldemort may be working on a plan to rise again."

"Oh? What makes you think that?"

"Your dream, for one. The disappearance of a ministry witch named Bertha Jorkins. Your confirmation recently that you recognized her name from the dream, as well. And other whispers. My sources in Albania also tell me that they can find no sign of Voldemort; he has left the country, it seems. Between that and everything else, I fear he may be in Britain again, working on getting his body back."

 _ **Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my body to me, to me,**_ Al sang in their head.

 _Shut up! It's not funny!_

 _ **Sorry, dark humor.**_

She had let out a small giggle though, to which Dumbledore raised an eyebrow. "Al made a bad joke," she explained.

"Ah."

"Anyway, that is very concerning indeed, sir. I hope you're wrong. But yeah, with all that, I think you're right."

"Yes, and the worst part is, I was hoping to find and destroy his horcruxes before he had that chance. But it has not been an easy task. I've been scouring the country for information about his life which might lead me to more horcruxes, but it is slow going. People don't like to talk about him, after all. And you know, I don't even know how many of the foul things he has. But what is concerning me more is what will happen if he returns. For the fact that you can feel his presence when he is near, and see what he is up to in dreams, strikes me as rather ominous, given that your scar hurts every time it happens. If not for that, I would just assume it is Alastair's Seer ability."

"But you think it's something else?"

"Yes. And I fear it's a connection that might go two ways, once he regains his body. I've been trying to find him to stop him, too, but that has borne no more fruit than the horcrux quest."

"Well what does he need to resurrect himself? If you know that, you can use it to find him, maybe?"

"That is an avenue I have been exploring as well. But the information about those rituals is hard to come by as well, especially for someone as famous for being a Light wizard as I."

He sighed, then continued. "Alas, one of the pressing concerns now is teaching you occlumency, an art designed to protect the mind from intrusion by legilimency, so that if I am correct, you can close your mind to Voldemort once he returns to power. For I fear he may eventually work out the two-way nature of the connection, and send you false visions to manipulate you. And if I am wrong, then occlumency will keep him from being able to pull secrets from you in person, the way legilimency usually works, so it is a good idea anyway. And best to teach you now, while he is still too weak to be a threat."

 _ **Ask him why he's so concerned about this. What makes him think this connection exists?**_

"What makes you think this two-way connection exists? How do you know it isn't just Al having visions?"

"I do not know that, of course. But I am concerned. Tell me, did your scar hurt when you had the vision about the Goblet of Fire?"

"No, it didn't."

"And that is why I am concerned. Your vision of Voldemort, as well as your sense when he was near in the first year, both made your scar hurt, but your other vision did not. I suspect something else is at work here. Something happened when Voldemort tried to kill you. The same thing that transferred his parseltongue skill to you may be responsible for your visions of him, and your sense of when he is near."

"What do you think it _is_ , though?"

"I have only suspicions, and one strong suspicion in particular. I would like to tell you what it is, and I will, but I wish you to learn occlumency from me first, so I can be sure that the information will be safe in your head."

"Okay, that sounds good to me."

"Excellent. Now, I do believe your Chandra Rahasyamay already has a natural knack for occlumency, but if I am correct, it only works when he is Out. Or when he is awake, perhaps. May we start now, as a test?"

"I suppose so. What's this going to be like? What _is_ legilimency, anyway? And have you discussed it with Sirius?"

"Yes to your last question. Here is a permission slip he has signed," Dumbledore said, showing her a letter.

It said, simply, 'Professor Albus Dumbledore has my permission, as Adira Potter's guardian, to teach her and the other Potters occlumency,' with his signature at the end.

"Alright. But what about my other questions?"

"Legilimency is a magical practice that allows the legilimens to peruse the surface of another's mind, in search of information. A skilled enough legilimens can even manipulate you into thinking of certain kinds of memories in his search for information. It is not mind reading, though, not exactly. The human mind is complex, many layered, and ever jumping around from one thought to the next nonstop. So it is rather like trying to piece together a Muggle movie by taking photos of the film as it is rolling, except there are multiple films running at once, even in the mind of the average person. With luck and skill, the legilimens can use the images and feelings glimpsed in your mind to interpret them accurately. Even, I fear, in a mind as unusual as yours."

"Okay. So how does it feel?"

"I am not really sure how to describe the experience. Any description I give will be a metaphor at best. But it should call up memories and images to your conscious mind."

"Alright. So, er... should I sit or stand?"

"I think stand, it is the best way to learn. Standing makes you more alert than if you were sitting down, which is why it is a good learning aid."

Adira stood up, adjusting her glasses, and Dumbledore stood up as well, brandishing his wand.

"Should I have my own wand out?"

"Yes. Though this is a test, I will want you to try to resist me however you can. Try to use your mind first, though."

"Okay," she said, getting out her holly wand. "Go ahead."

" _Legilimens._ "

The office swam in front of her eyes and vanished, image after image was racing through her mind like a flickering film so vivid it blinded her to her surroundings.

She was Iliana, flying in a Quidditch game. She was Zoey, sneaking into the Slytherin common room to put a spell on Malfoy. She was 11, releasing the snakes from the zoo and Al was calling 'Fly, my pretties!' with her old voice, since that was before they'd started transforming. Then she was Al in second year, fearfully using his only weapon, his voice, to talk the basilisk into-

 _ **NO! That's dangerous and PRIVATE!**_ Al yelled in their head.

The room returned in time for her to see Dumbledore reeling backwards.

"Most impressive for a first time," he said. "Er, I take it that was Alastair yelling?"

"Yes, sir. Um... how much of that did you see?"

"Just bits and pieces here and there. I recognized the incident that led to us meeting for the first time. That was, I have to say, fairly amusing, how Alastair referenced the Wizard of Oz."

"Yeah, that was pretty funny alright. Did you see anything else?"

"I saw the basilisk. And I saw young Zoey up to something, but I could not discern what."

Adira grinned.

"Anyway now... if you please, could you wake up Chandra? I do not need you to transform, I just wish him to be awake and co-conscious with you, for another test."

"Um, okay."

 _Chandra? Chandra? Are you there?_

There was no response.

 _ **CHANDRA! WAKEY WAKEY!**_

 __There was an internal groan.

 _~What is it you desire, Sarcastic Defender?~_

 _ **Just stay awake and co-conscious for now, okay?**_

 _~As you wish.~_

"He's awake and co-conscious, as you asked."

"Good. Ready? _Legilimens._ "

The room swam again, but this time she saw a different series of images. A mountain stream through a small wooded area, the water gently burbling. The ocean, its waves pounding against the rocks. A sunlit summer day in a field of wheat, a farmhouse in the distance. A thunderstorm, the sky dark and ominous, occasionally forked with lightning. Then the mountain stream again.

Her vision came back. Dumbledore had lifted his wand.

"Now there, that is perfect occlumency! Chandra, it seems, is a natural at it. He resists without resisting, keeps intruders out of your mind with simple images of nature, which is one of the many ways occlumency can work. As Alastair demonstrated, an act of willpower can force someone out, too. And yet another method would be to show the intruder a modified version of one's mind, so they do not even suspect that what they are seeing is false. But that one is very advanced."

Adira didn't know what to say to this. Finally, she decided to say, "Cool."

"Yes. Of course the best would be that last one, but any of the other methods would be adequate. I wish the rest of you to learn one or more of the occlumency methods, for those times when Chandra is not available. But unless you have any questions, I think that will be enough for tonight. I will let you know when the next lesson is. Do you have any questions?"

"Um... not right now. But if I think of any, I'll write them down for later."

"Excellent. You may go now, Adira."

"So Dumbledore is teaching you guys occlumency?" Ron asked to confirm, after she'd told him.

"Yes. He reckons there's some kind of connection between Voldemort and me," she said, ignoring his flinch at the name. "The same thing that lets me speak with snakes, in fact. Whatever _that_ is."

"And Chandra is naturally good at it?"

"Yes. Now can we stop with the questions? I've got homework to do."

Wednesday after dinner was another Dueling Club meeting, and again Adira got paired with Javier. He had improved slightly over the weeks they'd been doing this, and wasn't such an embarrassment anymore, but he still had a hard time ducking or dodging, his reflexes were still slow, and he still had a hard time thinking of spells to cast while under pressure.

Moody was there, too, adding his expertise to the club by teaching them about using spells to incapacitate the opponent, or otherwise prevent them from casting. One such spell was a horn-tongue hex, that made the tongue grow a tough shell of keratin which made speaking pretty much impossible until it was reversed.

"Lasts longer than _Silencio,_ you see. A _lot_ longer, if they don't know the counter-hex. Doesn't stop them from casting non-verbally, of course, but still useful to learn. If you want to stop them casting non-verbally, too, a Confundus will do the trick pretty well."

While Adira was dueling, Chandra was thinking. He'd been doing that a lot since being woken up the day before. He'd especially been thinking about his magic. He was so deep in thought, now, that he didn't notice a nearby duel go off the rails, with Ron and Malfoy tossing other spells around than the one they were supposed to be learning. But he sure noticed when a Stunner hit Adira in the face.

Instead of falling over, though, Chandra grabbed control of Adira's body and righted it just in time.

"Interesting, Potter," Moody said, making his slow way over to her. "You took a Stunner right to the face, Potter, how are you still standing?"

"The stunner did fly, taking out my sister dear. I, Chandra, was near."

"First strange riddles, now bad haikus? I'm starting to wonder if you just enjoy being annoying, Rahasyamay," Moody said. "At least I'm assuming that's you. But anyway, that's fascinating. Adira got stunned, but you didn't? Stunners aren't supposed to work that way. Must've been a weak one. You got lucky."

As Moody left to get back to teaching, Chandra stood there in Adira's body. Switching the holly wand to his left hand, he said, "Well perhaps we shall now be on even terrain, young artificer?"

"Er... I suppose so. I don't know if I feel comfortable dueling you, Chandra," Javier said.

"My magic is open to me. I need only feel the feelings to unlock the spells."

"I guess."

"If it helps," Adira's voice said, now taking on a familiar harsh tone as the dragon heartstring wand ended up in their right hand, "you can duel two at once."

"You can do that?"

"His words ring true. I hold the left side, he holds the right."

"Well, okay."

"As interesting as that would be," Moody said, returning again, "for a two on one like that, I think I'd rather see you go against young Mr. Malfoy."

"Yes, because that worked out so well the first time," Al said, still with Adira's voice.

"Well that secret is out already, so I wouldn't worry about it," Moody said.

And so Al and Chandra, controlling Adira's body, fought Malfoy in a duel that was 'anything legal and not too harmful goes.'

"And no snakes this time, Malfoy, or I'll turn you into a mouse and have Mrs. Norris chase you. Ready? One, two, THREE!"

The fight was intense, and mostly involved Al versus Malfoy. But Chandra was thinking, because with Al doing most of the work, he could take his time and be clever about what he did to help. After almost a minute, during which it looked like Malfoy was winning, Chandra made his move.

Only, without meaning to, he forgot to say the incantation. And in point of fact, he'd let his mind wander a bit too much and felt the wrong sort of feelings for what he wanted. But _something_ happened to Malfoy, anyway.

"AHHHH!" Malfoy shouted, falling to the floor as though he suddenly weighed 500 pounds, his wand rolling away from him.

Al and Chandra blinked in surprise and looked down at Malfoy. He looked like he'd been glued to the ground so firmly that he couldn't move. He could speak, and was cussing a blue streak, but he couldn't move at all.

"Interesting effect," Chandra said aloud. "Not what I was going for, but in retrospect perhaps this is better."

"Why, boy? What were you trying for?" Moody asked.

"I was trying to make him fly in the air."

"I didn't hear you say any incantation. Did you cast it silently?"

"Er... yes," he said, deciding not to tell the man any more than that, in case his suspicions were wrong.

"Well clearly you said it wrong in your head somehow. Here, Malfoy, I'll undo it for you."

Moody cast a spell at Malfoy, and they saw the light of a spell, but Malfoy remained stuck to the floor. Confused and intrigued, Moody cast some diagnostic spells on Malfoy instead.

"Wow," Moody said. "This is weird. I've never seen a spell like this in my life, and that's really saying something. Also, mis-cast spells usually have _some_ relationship with the intended spell. This... I don't know what this even is. The arithmancy on it is highly peculiar. Doesn't even look like Western magic. It reminds me a little of African magic, but also of Chinese spellwork. And yet it's neither of those things."

"Stop bloody commenting on it and GET ME OFF THE FLOOR! Please. Sir." Malfoy said, irritably.

Everyone else in the room, who had long since stopped to watch, were laughing at his predicament.

"Hold your hippogriffs, boy, I'm working with magic I've never seen the like of in over 80 years of being an Auror. You're going to have to be patient and quiet while I work out the arithmancy necessary to figure out the counter-curse. Unless Mr. Rahasyamay wants to take a crack at reversing it?"

"I shall ponder the question, too," he agreed, and started thinking.

Chandra rubbed the tip of his wand against his chin as he thought. Moody was too preoccupied with doing complicated maths with conjured parchment and quill to tell him off for this. But after a few minutes, Chandra pointed his wand at Malfoy and concentrated on feelings of lightness.

Without the warning of any incantation or spell-light, Malfoy lifted off the ground and into the air, shouting.

"AHH! GET ME DOWN! GET ME DOWN!"

"Oops," Chandra said, to general laughter and applause. "A genuine error on my part, White Ferret. Hold on, I'll get you down."

But Malfoy had managed to grab his wand before he'd flown into the air.

"Accio floor!" he shouted in desperation.

He immediately went flying right at the floor, hitting it with a loud smack.

"That was most unwise, White Ferret."

Just then, Adira woke up and retook control of her body.

"What's going on? Wait... oh. Oh!" she started giggling, then turned to Malfoy, intending to nudge him with a toe, but he was up in the air again.

"Foolish boy. But at least I know how to counter a Wingardium Leviosa," Moody said. And sure enough, in several seconds he had Malfoy on the ground again.

" _Rennervate,_ " he then cast, once Malfoy was down. The pale boy woke up and looked around, turning pink with embarrassment.

"You should get to the hospital wing, Malfoy. You hit the ground pretty hard with that stupid summoning charm, and now your nose is bleeding. Rest of your face doesn't look great, either. Honestly, summoning the floor, what were you thinking? I know you're smarter than that! Now GET!"

Malfoy ran out of the room, everyone laughing.

"And you lot," Moody said, turning to Adira. "I'm guessing you're Adira again, am I right? Don't answer that, it's not important. Just tell Mr. Rahasyamay he needs more practice before he starts trying to use his magic in combat. I don't know how he managed to mis-cast that badly. Sure, it was useful this time around, but it's best to know what you're doing so you don't kill someone by accident."

Adira nodded. "Understood, sir."

"Good. In retrospect, it would've been safer for me to figure out the arithmancy on that spell. Anyway, that's enough excitement for one night. Dueling Club adjourned."

After the strange events of the Dueling Club, Adira was in her room, with Chandra wielding the holly wand in his left hand, experimenting with the new form of magic he'd discovered. Or rather, it wasn't new; in retrospect, the golden killing curse and the other accidental magic he'd done had been the same thing. Similar to the usual sort of accidental magic, but more controllable.

At least, more controllable _in theory_. Chandra was having mixed results with his experiments. The first time he accidentally set something on fire, Adira insisted he cast on rubbish only. Now there was rubbish on the ceiling, the wall, floating in the air, and once he'd managed to accidentally Vanish an old parchment. In another experiment, two pieces of rubbish had suddenly become very attracted to one another, and were now stuck so firmly neither she nor Chandra could get them separated.

"This is fascinating, is it not?" Chandra asked her aloud.

"Yeah, I guess. It'll be useful if you figure out how to do it properly. You haven't been using any incantations. I'm not sure how you're activating the magic without an incantation."

"When it happened earlier, I felt a tingle. Both times, the tingle. It is the tingle that does it. I have figured out how to replicate the tingle."

"Well that's useful. Ugh, here we are talking aloud to each other."

Chandra pointed his wand at another piece of rubbish and Adira felt the tingle he'd mentioned. The crumpled-up sweets wrapper got squished to the floor like Malfoy had, but worse.

 _ **If only you could do it consistently**_ , Al thought.

 _~I am new to this, Sarcastic Defender. Patience.~_

 _ **Do you even need the wand? I seem to recall you casting those gold killing curses wandlessly.**_

 _~I do not know. Let me check.~_

Chandra put the wand back and tried several times to cast wandlessly. On the third time, he got water to come out of his finger like the aquamenti charm did with a wand. Stopping it from doing that took a bit more work, but once he got it to stop, he attempted to clean up the mess wandlessly, too. That took a dozen tries before he glared at the puddle in frustration.

 _ **I also seem to recall you doing magic with songs, as well.**_

Nodding, Chandra thought of which song to try. When he settled on one, he started making a scrubbing motion with his hand and sang, "I've been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain..."

He had to sing a few more verses, finally losing himself in the song, before it kicked in and the water evaporated.

 _ **First,**_ Al thought to him, _**using a song with lyrics that include 'in the desert, you can't remember your name,' is probably a bad idea. We got lucky this time, but next time we might not.**_

 _~Ah yes, that is an excellent point, Sarcastic Defender.~_

 _ **That said, have you tried looking for books on wandless magic? I've heard many African wizards don't use wands because of the witch hunts still going on there.**_

 _~Sounds like a good idea.~_

They stopped what they were doing then to write a letter to Sirius saying 'If you haven't already gotten us a gift, Chandra would like some books about wandless magic from around the world. It appears he's got a knack for it and would like to learn more.' They sent it off with Hedwig and then went about trying to get rid of the garbage that was all over everywhere from Chandra's experiments.

Endnotes: Bit of a shorter chapter, but the next place I wanted to go didn't really fit in this chapter.

I have no idea what porlocks actually do, as it doesn't really say on the wikia aside from "horse guardians"; their response in this fic is completely my own invention.

Adira's first legilimency experience goes the way it does here because she's already calm, since Snape isn't the one teaching her, Dumbledore is. Also, I favor the theory that in canon, Voldemort was watching the lessons through Harry's eyes and so Snape _had_ to teach him poorly to maintain his cover. Helped, of course, by the fact that Snape is already a piss poor teacher. Though how much of that is also an act, I don't claim to know.

Point: "The name 'Adira' being so different from 'Harry' is confusing."

Counter-point: Several people who originally knew me by my deadname - which started with a T, had two syllables, and sounds _nothing_ like 'Fay' - had no apparent problem calling me 'Fay' when I told them that was my new name. If they could adapt, so can you.


	30. The Unexpected Task

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 30"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty: The Unexpected Task**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}.__ _And now_ _ _~Chandra.~__

 _ **Note 4:**_ __ _Harry Potter and his world are brought to you by the letters J and K, and by the Rowling Association of Britain. And, of course, by viewers like you. The rest of this fan fiction is brought to you by Fayanora. Which, if you were curious, is pronounced fay-uh-nor-uh._

 _If you_ _ _weren't__ _curious, my apologies._

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

On Thursday, Iliana was Out for Transfiguration, where they were doing cross-species switches. She was dutifully taking notes, even though Transfiguration wasn't her best class. Oddly, for all that Zoey was great at wandless transfiguration, none of them was particularly good at the wanded version. They weren't the worst, either, but it was a struggle.

Toward the end of class, McGonagall made sure to get everyone's attention for a special announcement.

"I have something to say to you all. The Yule Ball is approaching — a traditional part of the Tri-wizard Tournament and an opportunity for us to socialize with our foreign guests. Now, just like the Hogsmeade visits, the ball will be open only to third years and above — although you may invite a younger student if you wish —"

Lavender Brown let out a shrill giggle. Parvati Patil nudged her hard in the ribs, her face working furiously as she too fought not to giggle. Professor McGonagall ignored them and continued.

"Dress robes will be worn," Professor McGonagall continued, "and the ball will start at eight o'clock on the 23rd so that students may go home for Christmas, and it will finish at midnight. The Yule Ball will be held in the Great Hall. Now then —"

Professor McGonagall stared deliberately around the class.

"The Yule Ball is of course a chance for us all to — er — let our hair down," she said, in a disapproving voice.

Lavender giggled harder than ever, with her hand pressed hard against her mouth to stifle the sound. Iliana could see what was funny this time: Professor McGonagall, with her hair in a tight bun, looked as though she had never let her hair down in any sense.

"But that does NOT mean," Professor McGonagall went on, "that we will be relaxing the standards of behavior we expect from Hogwarts students. I will be most seriously displeased if a Gryffindor student embarrasses the school in any way."

The bell rang, and there was the usual scuffle of activity as everyone packed their bags and swung them onto their shoulders.

Professor McGonagall called above the noise, "Miss Potter — a word, if you please."

Wondering what this could be about, she grabbed her things and went up to McGonagall's desk.

Professor McGonagall waited until the rest of the class had gone, and then said, "Potter, the champions and their partners —"

Turning red slightly, Iliana asked, "Partners for what?"

Professor McGonagall looked suspiciously at her, as though she thought she was trying to be funny.

"For the Yule Ball, of course. Your dance partners."

"Oh. That. Of course. Um... about that, I was wondering-"

"Yes, same-sex partners are allowed, Miss Potter."

"That's good. But, er... there was another thing I wanted to know. Hypothetically, of course. But well, you know, with there being more than one of us in this body—"

"You wish to know if multiple partners is acceptable?"

She nodded.

"Well everyone present is welcome to bring a partner, Miss Potter, so if more than one of you will be present, you may bring more than one partner. Just do try not to make too big a spectacle of it, I think six partners would be a bit ridiculous, don't you think?"

"That won't be a problem. Zoey is six, Tier doesn't care, Chandra doesn't care, Adira is undecided, and really the only one of who wants to go with someone else for sure is Al. I just wanted information for, well, just in case, you know?"

"I understand. Do try to limit it to three partners, though. Anyone else you wish to go with will likely be there anyway, unless you wish to invite someone younger."

Iliana raised an eyebrow. Even though she was 14, the thought of dating anyone younger than 13 felt more than a little weird to her. But she supposed that rule was for the 13 year olds dating those who were 12. If you could call it 'dating' at that age.

"Anyway, I was trying to say, Miss Potter, that you will need at least one partner for the Yule Ball, since you are a Champion. The Champions traditionally open the ball."

"What, with an opening dance?"

"Exactly."

"Um... what if we don't know how to dance?"

"I don't doubt someone can teach you. In fact, I have some dance lessons planned for students who wish to learn."

Iliana tried to imagine McGonagall dancing, and found she couldn't. She tried to keep the shock off her face, but it didn't feel like she was very successful.

"You dance?"

"Yes, Miss Potter, I dance. Teachers _are_ human beings with lives of our own, even though most of us have either never married or are... no longer married, or are... widows. Or widowers. After all, many of us are quite aged, I'm sure you've noticed."

It was hard for her to miss the surge of emotion at the word 'widows.'

"My condolences on your loss, Professor."

McGonagall blinked at her in surprise, then looked down, clearly upset. "Thank you for that, Miss Potter. But it was many years ago. Nearly a decade, in fact."

Iliana didn't know what to say to this. Her parents had died 13 years ago, and Sirius, Remus, and herself still weren't over it. She said nothing, then.

"Well you should probably find out if Mr. Mendoza can dance, too, if Alastair is going to take him to the Ball."

"Yes. Thank you, Professor," she said.

"You may go now, Miss Potter."

With the announcement of the Yule Ball, Iliana found she had to fend off more suitors than she would have imagined possible. It seemed that despite half or more of the school thinking they were an attention-seeking metamorphmagus and a liar, or else severely insane, it didn't stop people from wanting to go to the ball with a Triwizard Champion. Aside from being asked by several people – both boys and girls – whom she'd never even seen before, some of whom were as old as 17 or 18, they also got asked out by an annoying boy named Cormac McClaggen and once, by a second-year student. Most of them she could fend off by saying they had a date with Javier already – for she'd asked on Al's behalf and he'd enthusiastically agreed – but some of them, like McClaggen, didn't take no for an answer so easily. What was worse, McClaggen seemed to be convinced they had always been a girl, and the boys in the collective were just a disguise. How he could think that when their original name had been Harry Potter, she didn't know.

It got so bad after a few days that she had to hex a couple people to slow them down while she ran away into the library, which was blessedly quiet. In fact, she noticed that one of the few people there was Luna.

Sitting down across from Luna, she sighed. "Hi, Luna."

"Hello, Iliana. You look out of breath. Are you trying to escape nargles?"

"No, trying to escape Cormac McClaggen. That berk can't take no for an answer. I had to hex him in the face to get rid of him."

"What did you hex him with?"

" _Engorgio skullus._ "

Luna giggled.

Iliana grinned. "Well he already had a swollen head, I just made it obvious."

Luna put her hands over her mouth and was overcome with such a fit of giggles that Iliana was afraid she was going to pass out, and Iliana was having to try to apply what little occlumency she knew to block out the overpowering wash of amusement coming from Luna. Luna did things like that, sometimes; usually, she was placid almost to the point of stoicism, but every now and then her emotions would bubble over and she'd do things like going into minutes-long giggle fits. And Iliana being an empath, even with occlumency the laughter was contagious. Her resistance broke, and suddenly she was laughing – quietly – with such fervor that after a couple minutes, she had a stitch in her side and her vision was going weird from being unable to breathe.

When she started coughing, Ms. Pince tried shushing her, but then she fell out of her chair. Her own amusement of the situation ended, but the floodgates of her empathic sense were still open to a deluge of laughter from Luna, who was unaware of her plight.

 _ **OUT!**_ _s_ houted Al in their head, and suddenly there was an iron wall of willpower blocking their empathic sense. Iliana rolled onto her back and moaned. When she heard the sound of someone clearing their throat, she opened her eyes. It was Ms. Pince.

"Sorry," she said weakly. "Empath, you know. Couldn't stop."

Ms. Pince glared then at Luna.

"Ms. Lovegood," the old woman said.

Luna, still fighting to keep her giggles smothered, opened her eyes and looked at the severe form of Ms. Pince. This only served to give her a second wind.

"Ms. Potter, maybe you should take your friend to the hospital wing and get her a Calming Draught."

"Yes, Ms. Pince," she said.

Iliana struggled to stand. Being too weak to carry Luna herself, she pointed her wand at the giggling Ravenclaw and said, " _Mobilicorpus._ "

As soon as Iliana got Luna out the door into the corridor, Luna stopped trying to muffle her laughter and was cackling, chortling, and occasionally snorting with laughter. It was quite a sight to see Iliana using her wand to float the madly-laughing Luna along in the air. Iliana was growing more and more astonished by the minute at Luna's stamina. How she could still be breathing with as much as she was laughing was a mystery to Iliana.

"You made... his head... swollen..." Luna managed to say before doubling over with another fit of laughter.

Even more oddly, when Iliana finally got Luna into the Hospital Wing, Madam Pomfrey took one look at her and sighed with exasperation.

" _Again_ , Miss Lovegood? That's the third time this month!"

Madam Pomfrey moved Luna onto a bed with her own wand and got a small bottle from a cabinet, from which she used an eyedropper to get small amounts of the potion into Luna's mouth. Luna relaxed a little bit and went silent for a few moments, then started laughing all over again.

"She does this often, then?"

"Yes."

Iliana had a sense like there was more the matron wanted to say, but wasn't. Probably because it was confidential medical information.

"I know she's prone to emotional outbursts, often inappropriate in strength or type, and not just laughter, but this is the longest I've seen one of her outbursts last."

Madam Pomfrey dropped some more potion into Luna's mouth, and Luna relaxed for the most part, chuckling a little again here and there.

"Laughter can be a stress reliever," Madam Pomfrey said. "It can be a safety valve, too. I suspect Miss Lovegood just needed a good laugh, and went a little overboard."

"She'll be okay, though, right?"

"Yes, Miss Potter, she'll recover."

Luna was back from the hospital wing in time for supper. When Iliana saw her, she went over to the Ravenclaw table and sat next to her.

"You feeling better, then?"

"Yes. I got a little carried away, but I'm better now. Oooh, black pudding."

"Good to hear."

Iliana stayed sitting next to her friend, and they chatted about this and that as she watched Luna eat.

"McGonagall said we need a date for the Yule Ball, because we're Champions. And of course Al and Javier are going."

"Are you going, too?" Luna asked.

"Maybe. It'd be pretty easy to make an appearance. Adira is thinking about it, too. What about you, Luna? You going?"

"I don't know. It might be fun. But there could be a lot of nargles there, too."

"You should go. It's more likely than not to be fun. And whether you have a date or not, you can still dance with people there."

"I'm not sure..."

"Oh come on, it'll be great! I want to see you all dolled up, I bet you'll look amazing."

"Well, Daddy _did_ get me some new dress robes this year. It _would_ be a shame to let them sit around doing nothing. Still, I'm not sure."

"You know what, I _will_ be there after all. I don't know about Adira, but I'll be there. I want to see you there. You can sit with us and the other Champions at the dinner, make sure the conversation is worth listening to."

Luna smiled. "Well, if you're going to be there, then I guess I'll come. Yes, I'll even join you at the Champions' table for the dinner. That could be fun."

"Good. And if you need any help doing your hair or makeup, come to Griffindor and Zoey can do something for you."

"I think I will. Thank you, Iliana."

"Good. I know it'll be Al at first, so you'll have to put up with him for a while, but I'll make an appearance if I have to shove Al head-first into the Basement myself."

Luna giggled, snorting a little as she did, but didn't go into another giggle fit, thankfully.

The weekend came and went with no sign of Rita Skeeter writing about Hagrid or anyone else as far as they could tell, which relieved Al to no end. They talked with him about it in Care of Magical Creatures, while preparing food for thestrals. (They hadn't been introduced properly to thestrals yet, as that would be later, but it was something Hagrid wanted help with all the same.)

"She didn' seem very int'rested in magical creatures, ter tell yeh the truth," Hagrid said, when Al, Ron, and Hermione asked him how his interview with Rita Skeeter had gone during the last Care of Magical Creatures lesson of the term.

"She jus' wanted me ter talk about you, Al," Hagrid continued in a low voice. "Well, I told her we'd been friends since yer first year. 'Never had to tell him off in four years?' she said. 'Never played you up in lessons, has he?' I told her no, an' she didn' seem happy at all. Yeh'd think she wanted me to say yeh were horrible, Al."

"You told her no? But I've done things in class that I shouldn't have."

"Yeh, but on the whole, yer alright. Course, then she asked about Chandra and the others. Asked when each of yeh came around first. I told her yeh first changed in Snape's class, but not much else. Weren't really her business, I figure, but that much'd be common knowledge by now."

"I just know she's looking to paint us as insane or attention-seeking. At least half the school already thinks that, she should ask them instead."

"Rubbish," Hagrid said. "Yer not mad! Yer just... diff'rent. Anyway, she's not allowed on the grounds. I told Dumbledore she was breakin that rule an' he took steps to keep her away. So she can't ask nobody else, least of all students."

"Ah, but don't we have another Hogsmeade visit on Saturday?"

"Yes," Hermione said. "So people can get things for the Yule Ball that they don't already have. Corsages, makeup, accessories, that sort of thing."

"What abou' it, Al?"

"Well she could ask people questions then."

"An' bother all them students doin their shoppin?"

"It's the kind of thing she'd do."

Al shrugged.

"You coming to this ball thing on Christmas Day, Hagrid?" said Ron, to fill the silence.

"Though' I might look in on it, yeah," said Hagrid gruffly. "Should be a good do, I reckon. You'll be openin' the dancin', won' yeh, Al? Who're you takin'?"

"Javier, of course."

"Ah, shoulda known. Any o' the rest of yeh goin?"

"Iliana is going to make an appearance. She's already been experimenting with her outfit in front of the mirror in our room. Adira hasn't decided yet."

"Well she better get a move on an' decide afore she ent got time left."

"Yeah."

"Any o' the rest of yeh takin anyone else other 'an Javier?"

"Not that anyone's told me yet. We asked McGonagall about it just in case, though. We can take up to three people if we want. Thank goodness, too. I mean, once the others start dating, things will get complicated, but I'm glad they're holding off for now. Adira thought about asking Cho Chang, but then we saw her and Cedric together, and that was the end of that, apparently. But Addy might still make an appearance."

"Oh Hagrid, I just remembered something funny," Ron said. "McGonagall had some dance lessons last weekend for those who don't know how to dance."

"Wha's funny bout that?"

"McGonagall dancing. It was weird. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it."

"I wonder if the Slytherins got similar lessons. I mean, I know they're mostly purebloods, but some might have needed it."

"Oy, now I'm imagining Snape dancing. I think my brain might just break from that mental image."

"You got a date for the ball yet, Ron?" Al asked.

"Er... um, no. Not as such."

"Well you better get on it."

Ron nodded. Then he looked at Hermione thoughtfully, but nervously. "Oy, Hermione?"

"Yes, Ron?" she asked.

"Er..." his face turned red. "Um... dyawannagototheballwifme?"

"Pardon?"

Al grinned knowingly at Ron. "Yes, Ronald, you need to enunciate."

His face turning even redder, Ron said, "D'you... d'you wanna go to the ball? With me, I mean?"

Hermione's face turned red, too, but Al didn't need to be an empath to see that she was going to have to let him down.

"Ohmygod, I'm so sorry, Ron, but someone's already asked me, and... and I said yes. I mean, I didn't think anyone was going to ask me at all, and then I just got so surprised to be asked, and I said yes right away. Sorry."

"What? Someone already asked you? Who?"

Hermione's face went bright red. "I... oh, I'd tell you, but I hardly believed it myself, you'd never believe me if I told you."

"Does that apply to me, too?"Al asked. "Because I'd believe it if Neville asked you. Actually, there's a fair number of boys I could see asking you out. Unless it was a girl who asked you?"

She shook her head. "No. I'm not into girls that way. It was a boy."

That was all she would say about it, though, no matter how much they continued to pester her about it.

"Well, Ron, you could always take Luna. She's not attached."

"Luna? No thank you, Al."

"Oh come on, she's sweet and brilliant and understanding. And she could use a boost from someone asking her to go. I mean, I know she's going anyway, but she'd be thrilled to be asked."

Ron shook his head. "Naw, mate. She's not my type."

"And what exactly _is_ your type, Ronald?" Hermione asked waspishly.

"Yeah really, I thought his type was 'female and breathing.'"

"Oy!" Ron shouted, throwing a piece of bloody tendon at Al, who ducked.

"But seriously, why not Luna?"

"I'd be a laughingstock!"

"Why?"

"Cuz she's so weird!"

"You're best mates with a bunch of different people who share a single body, whom most people think is an attention-seeking metamorphmagus or insane, and you don't want to go with Luna because _she's_ weird?"

"Well that's different. Apart from being a load of different people, and trouble being attracted to you, you're pretty normal."

"Fine, whatever Ron. Luna deserves better than you, anyway. Someone mature and considerate of others, I mean."

Ron chucked an entire kidney at Al that time.

"Oy, don' waste the meat you lot!" Hagrid snapped.

"I _should_ get a move on, you know … ask someone," Ron said. "Al's right. I don't want to end up with a troll."

Hermione let out a sputter of indignation.

"A … _what,_ excuse me?"

"Well — you know," said Ron, shrugging. "I'd rather go alone than with — with Eloise Midgen, say."

"Her acne's loads better lately — and she's really nice!"

"Her nose is off-center," said Ron.

"Oh I see," Hermione said, bristling. "So basically, you're going to take the best-looking girl who'll have you, even if she's completely horrible?"

"Er — yeah, that sounds about right," said Ron.

"Ask Pansy Parkinson, then," Al suggested venomously.

"What? Eww, no. She's a- really horrible person. And she's too fond of Malfoy, anyway."

"Honestly, Ron, Luna's very pretty, and she's nice. Even if you _are_ an immature dunce, she'd be thrilled to be asked out by a boy, even one as emotionally stunted as you."

"I told you, Al, she's not my type."

"Fine. I'll see if Moaning Myrtle will have you, then."

Ron glowered at Al.

On the last day of term, a Friday, the castle was looking amazing with Christmas decorations that put other years to shame. The ball was less than a week away, and yet Ron still hadn't found a date for the ball.

Not, though, for lack of trying. Sort of. Chandra had decided to make an appearance that day, and he and Ron were in the entrance hall going to dinner when they saw Fleur Delacour talking to Cedric Diggory. She tossed her hair, which sparkled with supernatural glamor, and Ron's face went slack. Then, without warning, Ron burst out speaking.

"WILL YOU GO TO THE BALL WITH ME?" he shouted at Fleur.

Fleur looked back at Ron like he was a sea slug. Chandra chuckled at Ron's outburst.

"Red Knight, what has come over you?"

Ron's face returned to normal, then, as he realized what he'd done, he looked horrified, and took off running.

"Odd," Chandra quipped.

Fleur finally noticed him. "You again, from zat first night of ze tournament."

"Yes, that is me," Chandra confirmed.

"But 'ow... 'ow are you not a drooling eedeeot like your friend? I 'ad my Veela charm on, 'ow do you say... oh yes, 'full blast.'"

Chandra shrugged. "I do not know. But I should go see if he's alright."

With Fleur staring incredulously at him, Chandra jogged after Ron.

When Chandra got back to the common room, he saw Ron sitting ashen-faced in a distant corner. Ginny was sitting with him, talking to him in what seemed to be a low, soothing voice.

"Are you alright, Red Knight?"

Ron looked up at Chandra, a sort of blind horror in his face.

"Why did I do it?" he said wildly. "I don't know what made me do it!"

"She is part Veela. She was using her powers of charm on Cedric Diggory, and you got hit with it. I know, I was there with him," he explained to Ginny.

"What did her charm make _you_ do, Chandra?" Ginny asked.

"It had no effect on me. I felt it, yes, but it did nothing to me."

"Really? But you're a boy. Right?"

"Yes, all day long."

"Then it should have affected you."

Chandra shrugged. "I have no explanation."

"Did it affect any of the others?"

"They have been resting today."

Ginny looked thoughtful, while still idly patting Ron on the shoulder in a comforting sort of way. "Have you ever felt, er, attraction to _anyone_ before?"

"I am aware of how the sensation feels, from memories. But I do not recall ever experiencing it personally, yet."

"But you're 14, right?"

"Yes."

"Huh. Odd."

"Anyway, the silver flower is wasting her time with the badger seeker, for he is dating the eagle seeker."

"God," Ron said. "At this rate I'm gonna be the only person in school without a date. Well, except Neville."

"Neville's got someone, Ron," Ginny said.

"He does? Who?"

"Me. He asked me, and since nobody else had asked me yet, I said yes."

Ron sunk down in the chair he was sitting in. "Damn. Even Neville has a date."

Just then Hermione climbed in through the portrait hole.

"Why weren't you two at dinner?" she said, coming over to join them.

"Because the Red Knight got whammied by the silver flower's Veela charm, and asked her out. She had been aiming at Cedric Diggory. But he is spoken for."

"Yes," Ginny said, "and Chandra got hit by it too, only it didn't affect him!"

"Really? But he's a boy. Right?"

"Yes, I am a boy today."

"Hmm... I wonder if your gender flexibility has anything to do with it."

"He says he's never felt attracted to _anyone_ before."

"Really? At 14? Hmm... I wonder if you're asexual, Chandra?"

"Pardon?"

"Asexual. It means you're not attracted sexually to other people. Possibly aromantic, too, since the two can be connected."

"From context, I assume that means 'not feeling romantic attraction'?" Chandra asked.

"Yes. I read about it over the summer, at the public library."

"He could just be a late bloomer, too."

"Yes, that's a possibility."

Ron groaned. "I'm going to be the only person without a date to the ball."

"You should follow Sarcastic Defender's advice, and take the moon that loves well."

Ron just threw his head back and gave a frustrated grunt.

"Or if you don't wish that..." he trailed off, for he had spotted Parvati and Lavender coming in through the portrait hole. He considered Parvati at first, decided from the collective memory that she was too pretty to not have a date already, and even though Lavender probably had a date as well, he decided to try anyway, and went over to Lavender.

"Hello, Lavender."

"Oh, er... hi. Chandra, is it?"

"Yes. My friend, Ronald Weasley, is having difficulties finding someone to go to the Yule Ball with him. He is quite distraught at the moment, so I decided to ask for him. What do you say?"

Parvati and Lavender giggled. Then Parvati spoke. "Are you looking for someone, too?"

"No. I have no interest in the ball, and Alastair is going with Javier."

"Oh. Lav?" she asked her friend.

Lavender looked back at Ron, and giggled. "Well, he wouldn't be the first to ask me, but I haven't said yes to anyone yet. I wanted to know what my options were. Hmm... he's for sure better than McClaggen. He's friends with you, that's a plus. He's not bad looking, either... Yes, I'll go with Ron to the ball."

The two girls started giggling again.

Chandra bowed. "Thank you. I shall inform him."

He went over to Ron, and poked him in the shoulder.

"What?"

"Lavender Brown will go to the Yule Ball with you, Red Knight."

Ron perked up at once. "She _will_?"

Lavender nodded, then giggled again.

"Brilliant! Thanks, mate!"

"You are most welcome."

A couple days before the ball, the Potters woke up in Zoey's body and decided to go with it. Zoey spent an inordinate amount of time getting ready, mainly because she was transfiguring her existing clothing to look different, and ended up walking into the Great Hall wearing a dress that was eye-wateringly neon yellow with silver reflective trim, and a neon-orange witch's hat with silver reflective trim. She also had on heart-shaped sunglasses with one lens black and the other lens green, and also her great pink feather boa, but was wearing normal shoes. Several people choked on their food when they saw her outlandish outfit.

"Oy, Zoey, you dress worse than Dumbledore sometimes," Ron said.

"Thahnk you, dahling," she said with the 'snooty rich person' accent she occasionally used.

"It is too 'eavy, all zis 'Ogwarts food," they heard Fleur saying grumpily from behind them. "I will not fit into my dress robes!"

"Oooh there's a tragedy," Hermione snapped as Fleur went out into the entrance hall. "She really thinks a lot of herself, that one, doesn't she?"

"Hermione — who are you going to the ball with?" said Ron.

He kept springing this question on her, hoping to startle her into a response by asking it when she least expected it. However, Hermione merely frowned and said, "I'm not telling you, you'll just make fun of me."

"You're joking, Weasley!" said Malfoy, behind them. "You're not telling me someone's asked _that_ to the ball? Not the long-molared Mudblood?"

Zoey turned and pointed at him, and suddenly he was a white ferret again. Naturally, the room erupted into a riot of laughter from most tables, and righteous indignation from the Slytherins.

"Woah, Zoey!" Ron said when he stopped laughing. "I didn't know you could do that!"

"Normally I couldn't, but Malfoy's body still remembers being a ferret, so I just reminded it. That's a lot easier than trying to turn him into something different."

"Miss Zoey Potter," McGonagall's sharp voice sounded from behind her.

Zoey grabbed the table and leaned back to look at her upside-down. The hat, remarkably, stayed on her head.

"Yes, Professor?" she asked in a would-be-innocent voice. She glanced at the Slytherin table, and saw Malfoy was human again and storming out of the Great Hall.

"You know full well what I mean, young lady. Twenty points from Griffindor and a detention with me tonight. And if I catch you turning anyone into anything else against their will, I will make it fifty points. Do you understand me?"

Still looking at McGonagall upside-down, she let go with one hand to give a thumbs-up.

"Okie dokie, Professor. I promise I'll be good."

McGonagall snorted. "That'll be the day," she said. "Your detention will be at 7 o'clock tonight, Miss Potter."

"I'll be there," Zoey said.

"See that you are," the professor said before walking back to the staff table.

Zoey righted herself and started making herself a sandwich from the foods available. She took some toast and buttered it, dousing the butter in sugar and cinnamon. Then she put bacon, eggs, tomatoes, kippers, cheese slices, and sausage patties on that piece of toast. Next she took a piece of French toast, slathered it in blueberry jam, sprinkled pepper on the jam, squirted some ketchup on the jam, and made that the top piece of her sandwich. Ignoring the gagging noises of everyone around her, she bit into it with gusto.

"Yummy!" she said when she'd swallowed.

Several people moved further down the table as she continued eating the bizarre sandwich. The Weasley twins, however, watched in horrified fascination as she ate the entire thing, and washed it down with a mixture of orange juice and milk.

"Ah, orange juice milk, the nectar of the gods," she said.

She looked up. "Ron? Hermione? Drat, I scared them away."

"You grossed them out!" one of the Weasley twins said.

"Yeah, they ran away halfway through that sandwich," said the other.

"Brilliant prank, by the way."

"Prank? I was just having a delicious sammich."

The twins rolled their eyes at her. She rolled her eyes back at them.

With time til the Yule Ball growing short, Zoey spent a lot of time designing dress robes for Professor Lupin, who hadn't gotten any for himself with his teaching salary, and figuring out what she was going to do for Ron's robes. Complicating things slightly was the fact that her transfigurations normally didn't last more than a few hours, except when the collective was transfiguring their clothes during transformations; for those, skin contact kept them in their transfigured state indefinitely, and they wouldn't start to change back until after 36 hours without skin contact from Zoey or one of the others. Which just meant she had to leave her projects out in the room and touch them for a minute or two every once in a while to keep the transfigurations recharged.

They were also working on what to do for Al, Iliana, and now Adira, which involved a lot of switching back and forth among them, and some drawings by Zoey. But once they got the things done, Zoey could pull the completed transfigured objects in with her, and they could come back out with whichever person they went with.

She was really pleased with her work so far. They were all so beautiful she even thought about making one for herself and surprising everyone with an appearance. She was only six, but they couldn't get rid of her, since the shared body was old enough to be there. She grinned at that idea; she hadn't seriously thought about it before, but it would be a great prank to pull on everyone. So she got to work again, humming happily to herself the whole time.

On the 22nd, Zoey was taking a break in the common room. She was nearly done with the outfits she was working on, so she was resting for a bit by sitting with Ron and Hermione. Ron was making a house of cards out of Exploding Snap cards, a dangerous idea since they could explode at any moment and bring the whole thing down.

Zoey, for her part, was reading 'A Wrinkle In Time' by Madeline L'engle. Hermione was studying Potions.

Ron placed the last two cards on top of the castle and the whole lot blew up, singeing his eyebrows.

"Nice look, Ron … go well with your dress robes, that will."

It was Fred and George. They sat down at the table with Zoey, Ron, and Hermione as Ron felt how much damage had been done.

"I'm transfiguring his dress robes to look nice," Zoey said.

"Really? Can you do ours, too?" George asked. "We tease ickle Ronniekins about his, but ours aren't much better."

"Sure, I can do that."

"Thanks, Zoey."

"No problem."

George turned to Ron. "Ron, can we borrow Arnan?"

"Sure, he's in my room" said Ron. "Why?"

"Because George wants to invite him to the ball," said Fred sarcastically.

"Because _we_ want to send a letter, you stupid great prat," said George.

"Who d'you two keep writing to, eh?" said Ron.

"Nose out, Ron, or I'll burn that for you too," said Fred, waving his wand threateningly. "So … you lot got dates for the ball yet?"

"Yes," Ron said.

Fred regarded Zoey. "Oh yeah, Al's probably going with his handsome little snake. But you, Ron? You managed to get a date?"

"Always the tone of surprise," Ron said, annoyed. "Yes. Lavender Brown and I are going together. What about you? Who're you going with?"

"Angelina," said Fred promptly, without a trace of embarrassment.

"What?" said Ron, taken aback. "You've already asked her?"

"Good point," said Fred. He turned his head and called across the common room, "Oi! Angelina!"

Angelina, who had been chatting with Alicia Spinnet near the fire, looked over at him.

"What?" she called back.

"Want to come to the ball with me?"

Angelina gave Fred an appraising sort of look.

"All right, then," she said, and she turned back to Alicia and carried on chatting with a bit of a grin on her face.

"There you go," said Fred to Zoey and Ron, "piece of cake."

He got to his feet, yawning, and said, "Well let's go get Arnan, George, come on."

They left. Zoey, getting a feeling that they were up to something, put her book aside, took her wand out, and Disillusioned herself, silencing her feet and robes to sneak after the twins.

She found them in Ron's dorm, attaching a letter to Arnan's leg, then letting him fly out the window before leaving. Without thinking about it, Zoey bounded up to the open window and looked out, to see Arnan flying off. She didn't have much time.

" _Accio_ owl," she said, the Long-Eared Owl being pulled, struggling, into her hands.

Ignoring his indignant hoots, she took the letter off him and examined it. It was addressed to Ludo Bagman, of all people. More curious than ever, she used her wand to open it up and read it. From what she read, she gathered that Bagman had paid them their winnings in leprechaun gold, apparently deliberately. They'd given up trying to get their winnings from him, and were now just asking him for their original bet money back.

"Ah," she said at last. "So _that's_ what they're up to. Well yeah, I'd be pretty peeved too, in their place."

She added a note on the other side of the letter:

 _Dear Mr. Bagman,_

 _I'm Zoey Potter. Fred and George are my friends. Please return their original bet money to them as soon as possible, or I will turn you into something horrible. I assure you I can do it. If you don't believe me, ask around about my skills with wandless transfiguration._

 _Sincerely,_

 _Zoey Potter_

Then she reattached the letter to Arnan's leg. He wasn't happy about her treatment of him, but she apologized by giving him some owl treats from Ron's bedside table, and he seemed to be somewhat appeased with this by the time he started to fly away again.

 _Well, time to plan some backup plans in case Bagman doesn't listen to me,_ she thought with an evil giggle.

Endnotes: Both myself and a friend of mine, Lily, are prone to giggle fits like the kind Luna has here. Mine don't usually last more than five minutes, but some of hers have been known to last for hours. Some things are so funny they just keep sparking a new fit of laughter, and we get into feedback loops. Like Iliana with Luna, I don't know how she does it; I usually stop when I can't breathe anymore. (The key word being 'usually.')

I don't know if this is relevant to Luna or not, but inappropriate laughter can be a symptom of depression. And Luna strikes me as the type who suppresses her emotions, which causes them to eventually boil over from the pressure. Especially since she's been shown to have fits of inappropriate laughter in canon, though not nearly as bad as here. :)

None of us share food tastes with Zoey, either. Not even Molly, the one Zoey is somewhat based on.


	31. The Yule Ball

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 31"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-one: The Yule Ball**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__ _and %_ _ _Mother%__ _if I get around to it in this chapter._

 _ **Note 4:**_ __ _People assume that Harry Potter is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... Rowling-wohling... stuff._

 _ **Note 5:**_ _I am afraid I suck at writing French accents._

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

It was the 23rd, the day of the Yule Ball. Zoey was in the tub taking a full-on bath to try to relax a little before going into the busy day they had ahead for themselves. To try to take her mind off things, she had Tier give her gills so she could practice breathing underwater. He did so, closing up her lungs as he did, and she quickly ducked underwater to take in a mouthful of water. It passed over her new gills and felt just as good as breathing normally after holding one's breath. She stayed under for several minutes, rather enjoying the experience of floating in the warm water. She wondered how they would be able to keep warm in cold water since the task was in February. It _must_ be possible, or else they wouldn't be stupid enough to ask the Champions to do it. Would a warming charm be good enough? But that was for dry clothes, out in the air, right?

She finally got out of the bathtub and got dressed into her outfit for the ball. She looked at herself with her one green eye and one blue eye, her hair (still black and unstyled, though she would be changing that later today), and at her light brown skin. It'd been a while since she'd properly looked at herself in a mirror, and seeing herself like this made her decide she would need to insist on a series of pictures with Sirius and Remus and Hagrid if they could fit him into the picture, where each one of them would turn up, so there were photos of what the others used to look like. Zoey, for her part, hadn't changed a bit since first showing up years ago.

Nodding, she changed back into her school robes, ready for the day. She used her wand to float the outfits she'd made for the Weasley twins and marched into their dorm with them.

"Here you go, boys. I hope you like them."

"Wow!" George said.

"Cool," agreed Fred. "Very snazzy. I like the color scheme. Very fitting."

"Thank you."

"Thank you too, Zoey!"

"You're welcome. By the way, I expect you to be at the top of the grand staircase for my little fashion show at 7:30 pm, at the top of the stairs, okay?"

"Sure thing, Zoey. It'll be a small price to pay for these."

"Cool. See ya later! I have to get Remus his outfit, too."

She went back to her room and was soon hiding Remus's outfit in a black clothing bag because she wanted it to be a surprise to everyone later. She went about floating it down to his office.

When she got there, she knocked on the door.

"Come on in."

Zoey opened the door and brought in his outfit.

"Here's the outfit I made you. Now mind you, it'll turn back into a pumpkin in 36 hours unless I recharge the transfiguration or pull it into the place where I store stuff when I pull it in."

"A pumpkin?"

"Muggle reference. Just look at it, will ya?"

Lupin unzipped the black bag and revealed the robes inside. When he saw them, his eyes went wide as saucers.

"Zoey... these are beautiful. You could do this professionally, for a living!"

"If you think those are nice, wait til you see what I have for Adira and Iliana."

"I look forward to it. Thank you, Zoey."

She gave Lupin a hug. "You're welcome, Professor. By the way, I insist you come to the top of the grand staircase by 7:30 pm for a fashion show I'm putting on."

"A fashion show? I don't know about that, Zoey..."

"You'll be there or I'll turn your hair into seaweed in front of everyone at the ball. I've done the spell before, I know how to do it."

He sighed. "Fine, fine. I'll be there."

"Goody. See you later! I gotta get Ron's one now, I forgot."

When Ron saw his own robes, how Zoey had transformed them, he was rendered speechless with delight. Zoey giggled at his expression and that snapped him back to his senses.

"Merlin's pants, Zoey, these are amazing! They look like they cost hundreds of galleons!"

"It's pretty cool what you can do with a little transfiguration. Of course, I had to do it by designing it in my head, putting your ugly old robes on, transforming into one of the others, and coming back out with it like this, rinse and repeat until it looks right, but they'll last over a day that way before they turn back."

"Thank you, Zoey! You have no idea how much this means to me. I hated these robes before, but now... _wow._ They're bloody brilliant!"

"Glad you like them. Oh, also you have to be at the top of the grand staircase at 7:30 pm, dressed in these robes, because I have a fashion show planned."

Ron rolled his eyes. "Okay, sure. I don't mind showing these off. That's only a half an hour before the Ball anyway."

"Cool. Seeya!"

She ran off, determined to tell everyone she met about the fashion show.

When 7:30 rolled around, a crowd had formed around the grand staircase, comprised of most of the school. They were all already dressed for the ball, since that was just a half an hour away. Everyone was interested to see this 'fashion show.' Even Malfoy and his friends were waiting, so they could mock people at their leisure.

"Welcome everyone," said Zoey Potter's voice, as she appeared at the top of the stairs dressed for the Yule Ball. "This is the start of my fashion show! We start with me, because why not? Also this outfit is poo compared to what's coming up next."

She walked down the stairs, and everyone got to see her outfit better. It certainly matched her usual style, only taken to an extreme. It was, as they could see, a dress covered with metallic pink sequins. Her opera gloves were also pink and sequined, as were her shoes. In one hand, she carried a clutch purse that looked like a pink teddy bear. Her hair, normally black, was bubblegum pink and shaped in a style that all the Muggleborns recognized at once as Princess Leia buns. Then, as if for contrast, she had around her neck a necklace of snowflake obsidian beads.

"Like I said, pure rubbish compared to what's coming up. Next on our lineup is Fred and George Weasley. Boys!"

The two Weasley twins came into view and started down the stairs, making a big show of strutting their stuff. The fabric of their robes was shiny in a metallic sort of way. Both boys' robes went to their ankles, and over the main robes were fancy tailcoats. Fred's main robes were 'red carpet' red, and his tailcoat was blood red with gold buttons. He wore a gold cape that barely showed in the front, but went down to his mid-back. He had around his neck a gold silk ruffled cravat.

George's were identical in style, but his main robes were a dandelion colored silk, his tailcoat was gold with red buttons, and his cape and ruffled cravat were blood red.

"Would you believe, ladies and gentlemen, that these robes are transfigured? Yes, that is fake gold and fake silk, but it's real enough to fool someone until they cast a Finite Incantatem at it. Which, I assure you, would take Professor McGonagall's level of power to do, so don't bother trying it."

When the twins were done strutting their stuff, they went over to their dates, Angelina and Alicia, to watch the rest of the show together.

"Next on the list is Ronald Weasley!"

Ron nervously came into view and walked down the stairs. Thankfully, his hair was nicely styled; she had insisted on it when she saw him at lunch earlier.

Zoey had transfigured Ron's ugly maroon robes into cobalt blue silk robes with grey trim. He, too, had a silk tailcoat over his robes, which were a very different style and were navy in color with shiny silver buttons shaped like little pentagrams. Pinned to his lapel was a brilliant fire opal that looked like a sunset through clouds, in a silver setting, and he wore matching cuff-links. The style was still a little old-fashioned, but in a cool steampunk way. It certainly looked a lot better than Malfoy's outfit; _he_ looked like he was a vicar.

"Bloody hell!" someone from the crowd shouted. "Are those _fire opals_?"

"Yes, they are."

"You made that with transfiguration?"

"Yes. I made them from ordinary rocks I found outside."

"That's _amazing_ transfiguration! But how long can it last?"

"Since I had to use our transformation power rather than my transfiguration, it'll last 36 hours without a recharge. With timely recharges, it could last indefinitely."

There were a lot of murmurs of interest at this. Even Professor McGonagall came over to admire the transfiguration work. Ron was beaming at the attention, even though most of it was directed at his clothes rather than at him. He'd never worn something so nice before, and it felt _very_ good.

After almost five minutes of admiring Ron's dress robes, Zoey got everyone's attention again.

"Thank you all. Now we have one more men's fashion to reveal before moving onto the girls. Professor Lupin, if you would?"

Lupin came into view, also looking nervous. There were audible gasps from many of the girls and some of the guys at his appearance. He was clean-shaven and his hair done nice, with some kind of hair potion used on it. But it was his robes that were getting most of the gasps. As he came down the stairs, people got a better look.

Professor Lupin's under-robe was visible only as a strip down the front of pure white silk with a pattern of crescent moons embroidered in thread that was barely visible next to the white silk. He, too, had a fancy coat on over his robes, but his went all the way down to the floor, and the coat's color was a very pale, whitish mother-of-pearl. The buttons on the coat were little silvery crescent moons, and his cuff-links were made of moonstone.

When he got down to the bottom of the stairs, he gave Zoey a look that promised they would talk later. She pretended to look innocent.

They let everyone fawn over Lupin's robes for a little bit. This gave Zoey time to get back upstairs and change into Adira. It was harder to get everyone's attention without Zoey there to do it, but she managed, and soon began to walk down the stairs.

Adira wore a bottle-green backless silk dress with no trim. She wore a choker of black lace with an emerald gemstone. Her shoes looked like gold wire, but were mostly a clear plastic that had been magically reinforced. She bore a clutch purse that matched her dress. And her hair was tied up in a knot at the back of her head, simple but elegant. She had to endure a lot of wolf whistling and other catcalls, but she did so with quiet dignity.

It was a little tiresome climbing back _up_ the stairs, but Zoey was being insistent in their mind. For there wasn't much time left, and they wanted to get Iliana showed off and end with Al, so he could meet Javier before the doors opened.

With Professor McGonagall's help, they got everyone's attention for Iliana. Iliana wore an emerald green backless dress with whitish rainbow-opal trim that glittered like real rainbow opals. The dress was a full gown, just barely showing her shoes. She had on 'opera gloves' made of transfigured silver chain mail in flower-shaped patterns that had transfigured emeralds at their center; if it had been real, the piece would have cost a medium-sized fortune. Iliana's hair was a crown shape at the back of her head, which was made of braids with transfigured fully-colored rainbow opals in it. Her shoes were made of transfigured silver, with a daisy pattern in front – the center of the flower was onyx, the petals were rose quartz. She, too, had a clutch purse matching her dress.

And last down the stairs was Al. He, too, had the same jacket-over-robes thing going on as the others. His under-robe was blue silk, while his jacket – long like Lupin's – was royal purple silk with buttons that were stylized gold suns. His cuff-links were larger stylized suns with large yellow zircon stones taking up the bulk of the sun design's mass. The stones were even faceted to look like stylized suns with rays coming off them.

"My feet already hurt, and the ball hasn't even started yet," Al complained as he reached the bottom.

"Well with all the times you went up and down those stairs, I'm not surprised," Javier said.

Al took a good look at his date for the ball. They, too, were silk – _real_ silk – in Slytherin green with Slytherin's silver trim. He had ruby cuff-links on, though.

"You look nice, Javier," Al said.

"Likewise, Alastair."

"You lot finished just in time," Professor McGonagall said. "We've only got five minutes before the ball starts."

Two more came down the stairs then, and the murmurs drew Al's eyes over to them. The first was a girl he didn't recognize at first. Grinning, she went over to Viktor Krum. His jaw dropped.

It was Hermione.

But she didn't look like Hermione at all. She had done something with her hair; it was no longer bushy but sleek and shiny, and twisted up into an elegant knot at the back of her head. She was wearing robes made of a floaty, periwinkle-blue material, and she was holding herself differently, somehow — or maybe it was merely the absence of the twenty or so books she usually had slung over her back. She was also smiling — rather nervously, it was true — and she had gotten her oversized teeth shrunk; Al couldn't understand how he hadn't spotted it before.

"Holy crap!" he said.

But he didn't have long to ruminate on Hermione's appearance, for Luna came down the stairs then. She was wearing a remarkably normal looking sunshine-yellow dress with grass-green trim, with a matching purse on a long cord. Her normally straggly hair was styled into a beautiful French braid. She had on silver and ruby earrings and a matching necklace. Luna noticed him and waved with a smile on her face. He waved back, and felt something faint from one of the others, but what it was and who it was coming from, he didn't know.

Then Professor McGonagall's voice called, "Champions over here, please!"

Al took Javier's arm in his and the two boys went over to her. The chattering crowd parting to let them through. Professor McGonagall, who was wearing dress robes of red tartan and had arranged a rather ugly wreath of thistles around the brim of her hat, told them to wait on one side of the doors while everyone else went inside; they were to enter the Great Hall in procession when the rest of the students had sat down. Fleur Delacour and Roger Davies stationed themselves nearest the doors; Davies looked so stunned by his good fortune in having Fleur for a partner that he could hardly take his eyes off her. Cedric and Cho were close to Al too.

Hermione and Viktor Krum came over, then.

"Hi Al!" she said. "Hi Javier!"

Javier beamed at her. "Hi, Hermione. You look nice."

"Thank you," she said, grinning.

Al noticed that several of Krum's 'fan club' of girls were staring at Hermione in unflattering disbelief and deepest loathing. Pansy Parkinson gaped at her as she walked by with Malfoy, and even he didn't seem to be able to find an insult to throw at her. Even Ron gaped open-mouthed at her, once Lavender brought her to his attention.

"Hermione?" Ron said at last.

"Yes, Ron, it's me. You look very nice tonight."

"You too. You look amazing!"

"Thank you, Ron."

Once everyone else was settled in the Hall, Professor McGonagall told the champions and their partners to get in line in pairs and to follow her. They did so, and everyone in the Great Hall applauded as they entered and started walking up toward a large round table at the top of the Hall, where the judges were sitting.

The walls of the Hall had all been covered in sparkling silver frost, with hundreds of garlands of mistletoe and ivy crossing the starry black ceiling. The House tables had vanished; instead, there were about a hundred smaller, lantern-lit ones, each seating about a dozen people.

"Looks like we're going over here," Al said.

Dumbledore smiled happily as the champions approached the top table, but Karkaroff wore a very sour expression as he watched Krum and Hermione draw nearer. Not that he had a much better look for him and Javier. Ludo Bagman, tonight in robes of bright purple with large yellow stars, was clapping as enthusiastically as any of the students; and Madame Maxime, who had changed her usual uniform of black satin for a flowing gown of lavender silk, was applauding them politely. And of course, in the last seat was Mr. Alder. He was very glad that Iliana or Adira weren't the ones who had to sit next to him; that man made Al feel very protective of the girls in their collective. And all the other girls, too, come to that. He made a point of positioning himself and Javier between Alder and Hermione.

Mr. Alder turned and looked at him curiously.

"Who are you?"

Al pointed at the curse scar that never left them.

"Alastair Potter," he said.

"Ah, I see," Alder said, but Al could feel his disbelief. Alder plainly thought what so many others did, that they were faking for attention or something.

"Well, Mr. Potter, you did very well on the First Task. I hope you'll impress us during the second."

"Yes, so do I. In fact, since I have you here, Mr. Alder, I might as well ask some pertinent questions. Like, how do you expect us to not freeze to death in the Black Lake in February?"

"Ah, figured your egg out already, I see. Well I can't tell you that, Mr. Potter, you have to figure that out on your own."

"Well can you at least tell me how something that's underwater is going to be a spectator sport?"

"Ah yes, as to that, we have a spell that we'll cast on the Champions before you all go in. Once you're underwater, the spell will broadcast an enlarged image of you and your surroundings onto the surface of the lake for the spectators."

"Oh. Well that's good. I don't suppose we'll be able to see it in the lake?"

Alder chuckled. "No, of course not. The lake will look as it always looks from underwater."

"Good," Al said, turning away from Mr. Alder to focus on dinner.

There was no food as yet on the glittering golden plates, but small menus were lying in front of each of them. Al picked his up uncertainly and looked around — there were no waiters. Dumbledore, however, looked carefully down at his own menu, then said very clearly to his plate, "Pork chops!"

And pork chops appeared. Getting the idea, the rest of the table placed their orders with their plates too. Al considered his options and soon had a steak dinner with rice pilaf on his plate.

The conversation with the meal was a mixture. Al listened to Krum talking about Durmstrang while one of the others – he didn't know who – was listening to Dumbledore and Karkaroff. From _that_ conversation, they picked up that there might be a hidden room on the seventh-floor corridor across from that tapestry of the dancing trolls. He made a mental note to ask Dobby about it sometime.

Much more dull was Fleur talking to Roger Davies about how Beauxbatons was better than Hogwarts in the aesthetics department. This annoyed him greatly.

"Beauxbatons may be a very nice place, I don't know," he said to her. "But I'd rather have the safety of the castle." He paused, blinking, then said, "Wait, what am I saying? My life has been in danger every year I've been here so far."

"Vat do you mean, Alastair?"

"Oh let's see... first year, Dumbledore kept a giant cerberus in the school to guard the philosopher's stone, and that was the year I almost got eaten by a troll at Halloween and nearly died after the undead lich of a dark wizard tried to murder me. Second year a cursed diary controlled a bloody great basilisk in the school, compelling it to attack Muggle-borns, before I finally killed the monster, but not before I nearly got eaten _again_ by giant talking spiders in the Forbidden Forest. Third year I found out my best friend's pet rat was actually a disguised Death Eater, and there were soul-sucking monsters around a bloody _school_ , supposedly to protect me from a violent murderer who turned out to be my innocent godfather. And now this year, there's this whole Triwizard BS. I nearly got killed by a dragon, and who knows what I'm gonna have to do as an encore. The wizarding world is insane. If I survive long enough to see Moldyshorts pop his clogs for good, I'm going to work on making it a little less insane."

Karkaroff and Maxime turned to look at Dumbledore, as if his story was too ridiculous to believe unless it was confirmed.

"Sadly, I do believe Mr. Potter has made an accurate summation of the events of the past three and a half years."

"Giant talking spiders?" Karkaroff said, incredulous. "There are acromantulas in your Forbidden Forest?"

"Yes. That is one of the reasons the forest is forbidden, in fact."

"Dumblydorr, you kept a _cerberus_ in a school?" Maxime asked, bewildered. "Are you mad?"

Karkaroff laughed harshly at Dumbledore's expense.

"To be fair to him, he _was_ trying to keep an undead Moldywart from getting a new body. But he could have put a proper locking charm on the door at least. Hermione opened the door several times with a simple bloody _alohamora._ "

Karkaroff's laughter intensified, and he started pointing at Dumbledore and slapping the table. But then something seemed to finally connect in the man's brain, and he froze.

"When you say... that name... you do not mean the Dark Lord, surely?"

"Yeah. Met him twice; once as an adult, and another time I met Tom Riddle, his 16 year old self. Can't say I liked him much, either way. But I have to admit, as a teenager he was, at least, kinda handsome. Sometime between age 16 and now he apparently fell out of the sky onto the Ugly Tree, hit every branch on the way down, and then the tree fell on him. Then the Ugly Meteor struck the site and leveled the forest."

Dumbledore chuckled at this, as did Krum. Fleur looked shocked. Everyone else had gone pale. Alastair pretended not to notice as he ate some more rice pilaf.

"You dare speak of... of _him_ that way?" Karkaroff whispered hoarsely.

Al shrugged. "Tommy boy wants me dead either way. I figure if I taunt him, he'll kill me faster so I don't have to suffer."

The awkward silence grew palpable. He looked up with a forkful of rice halfway to his mouth.

"A little too blasé, was it?" he asked.

"Yes, Alastair, I believe it was," Dumbledore said.

"Hey, humor is how I cope with the crippling terror."

When all the food had been consumed, Dumbledore stood up and asked the students to do the same. Then, with a wave of his wand, all the tables zoomed back along the walls leaving the floor clear, and then he conjured a raised platform into existence along the right wall. A set of drums, several guitars, a lute, a cello, and some bagpipes were set upon it.

The Weird Sisters now trooped up onto the stage to wildly enthusiastic applause; they were all extremely hairy and dressed in black robes that had been artfully ripped and torn. They picked up their instruments, and Al, who had been so interested in watching them that he had almost forgotten what was coming, suddenly realized that the lanterns on all the other tables had gone out, and that the other champions and their partners were standing up.

The Weird Sisters struck up a slow, mournful tune; Al walked onto the brightly lit dance floor arm-in-arm with Javier.

"May I have this dance?" he asked Javier, whose cheeks were already reddening.

"Y-yes, thank you," Javier said.

"Lead or follow?"

"You can lead."

"Okay," Al said.

Al placed a hand at Javier's waist and took one of Javier's hands in his other. A minute into the song, everyone else joined in too, so the Champions were no longer the center of attention. Al kept his attention on Javier, but he could feel Iliana's attention wandering wherever Al's control of their eyes would let her look. And so it was that she noticed Sirius had come to the ball, probably getting in because he was their guardian. He had on red dress robes with gold trim. His cuff-links were lion's-head shaped and made of gold with orange zircons in the mane, and ruby eyes. Unlike the outfits Zoey had made, this one was most likely real, gemstones and all.

A few minutes in, she noticed Luna dancing around by herself, swaying and moving to the music like she hadn't a care in the world. Which, knowing Luna, was probably true. And while it was hard to pick one mind out of the mass of people in close quarters like this, Iliana thought she'd pinpointed Luna well enough to sense that Luna was indeed having fun.

Finally caving to Iliana's insistence, he started peering over the heads of the watching people. Neville and Ginny were dancing nearby — he could see Ginny wincing frequently as Neville trod on her feet — and Dumbledore was waltzing with Madame Maxime. He was so dwarfed by her that the top of his pointed hat barely tickled her chin; however, she moved very gracefully for a woman so large. Dean and Seamus were dancing together as well, but he couldn't tell if it was on a lark or on a date. And Mad-Eye Moody was doing an extremely ungainly two-step with Professor Sinistra, who was nervously avoiding his wooden leg.

After a while, the song ended and the Weird Sisters struck up a faster song. He moved to the beat as best he could, not really knowing any other dances, as did Javier.

A few moments later, Ron and Lavender drew near. They both looked like they were having fun, for which he was glad. Also nearby were Fred and Angelina, dancing so exuberantly that people were backing away in fear of getting hurt.

Al and Javier later danced another slow dance before taking a break to drink some butterbeer. They sat there in happy silence for awhile. When they finished their butterbeers, Javier said, "Iliana's turn?"

With a sigh, Al nodded. "See you in a few more turns," he said, then switched to Iliana in her emerald-green dress and her fancy silver mail evening gloves, her red hair in a crown shape again.

"I don't suppose you want to dance with me," she asked Javier, sounding like she hoped he'd say no.

"Maybe later, just for fun. But not now."

"Right. Ciao."

She walked back onto the dance floor, at the tail end of a song. She was looking around for someone to cut in on, but someone beat her to it.

"I know you're not with anyone, but can I cut in, Miss Potter?" asked the gruff voice of Moody.

"Um... well..."

"Yeah I know I'm not much to look at these days, Missy, and I'm old enough to be your grandfather, but I'm not looking for a date or anything else creepy like that, so don't worry about that. I just wanted an excuse to talk with you."

"Well, okay I suppose."

He took her arm and waist as was the custom, and they started to dance in just as ungainly a two-step as he'd done with Sinistra earlier. The moment he took her hand in his, she felt a strange sensation in her head that she couldn't identify, but it soon passed. But that was followed by the perception of a knot forming in her abdomen, but she didn't know what _that_ was about, either.

"So I hear you figured out your egg."

"Er... yes. Why?"

"Because I'm trying to get you through this tournament with your skin intact, Missy, that's why. I thought your Alastair didn't mind cheating to save your neck?"

"Yeah, I guess that's true," she agreed.

"Good. So you know what the Second Task is, I take it?"

"Going into the Black Lake to retrieve something. In the middle of February. There will be obstacles and creatures, I take it, as well. And I'll have two hours."

"Aye, that's the gist of it. As to what you'll be retrieving, it's hostages."

Her eyes widened. "Hostages? Like, _people_?"

"Don't get your knickers in a twist, Missy. They'll be in an enchanted sleep, cast by Dumbledore himself. They won't need to breathe to stay alive."

"But the song said-"

"That was just poetic license, for the sake of drama."

"Oh, okay. But is that even legal? The hostages thing, I mean."

"Of course it is. They have to agree to it, you see. And so do their guardians, come to that. Honestly, girl, the school makes your guardians sign a permission slip just to pop outside the gates to go shopping or snogging every so often, do you really think they wouldn't have permission slips for something this serious? After all, enchanted sleep or not, it's still mildly risky."

"Okay, that makes me feel better."

"Good. Now, do you know what you're going to do?"

"Oh that's simple. Tier can give us gills. We've already tested it. This morning, in fact. And he could easily give us flippers or something, too."

"Good. I thought it might be something like that, but I had some other ideas just in case. But yeah, there's gonna be obstacles and creatures indeed. If you need any books about underwater defensive spells, I can get you a list of them so you know what to ask the librarian for. And as to it being in the middle of February, well... I don't know how good your Tier is at shape-shifting, but if he can, I know animals like seals and dolphins have a layer of blubber that keeps them warm in cold weather. It's probably easier than trying to master Warming Charms that are up to the task of underwater use."

"Er... okay. I'll keep that in mind."

"Good."

They still had some time left in the song, so she asked, "How's the investigation going? You know, to find out who put our names in the goblet?"

"Not well. The problem is, someone could have been Imperioused or a dark wizard could have used Polyjuice Potion to pretend to be someone else, so it's hard to get any leads."

"I'd say to look into Alder, but honestly, he was giving me bad vibes even over the summer."

"Alder, you say? Well, could be. But I doubt it. He's a good man, so far as I know. But I'm glad to see you're remaining ever vigilant. You should always trust your gut. It might steer you wrong sometimes, but it's best to trust it anyway. And if you see any suspicious activity, let me or Dumbledore know at once, okay?"

 _ **Speaking of which,**_ Al thought, _**there was that sighting of Crouch on the Map**_.

 _ **#Right,#**_ she thought back at him.

Iliana started to open her mouth to tell Moody this, but something held her back.

"I'll do that, Professor," she finally said.

Thankfully, the song ended then, and she left Moody to go look for someone else to spend time with. She soon ran into Luna – literally ran into her.

"Ouch! Oh sorry, Luna."

"I'm fine, Iliana. Are you okay?"

"I'm good. I didn't actually get hurt, even though I said 'ow.' Force of habit."

"Good to hear you're alright. I- Oooh, I like this song," Luna said, and started doing a dance that was distinctly odd, revolving on the spot, her arms in the air and eyes closed, swaying to the music.

Iliana chuckled at her friend's antics and decided to do something similar. Doing a dance that had her turning as she moved forward and backward, she moved her arms in front of her and at her sides as though trying to move air with magic, her hands doing gestures she later learned from Chandra were similar to something called mudras.

She noticed, then, that Luna was barefoot again, but saw that her shoes were hanging from the cord of her purse. Getting into the spirit of things, she took her own shoes off and told Chandra to do something about them while she danced alongside Luna. (He ended up making them float along behind her.)

As she really began to get into this new dance style, she found herself dancing a lot on tiptoes, sort of, and occasionally crossing one leg past another, then switching them. There wasn't a point to it, since her legs were hidden by her dress, but it would have looked interesting if her legs were visible.

The song ended, and the two girls stopped. By some unspoken signal, they both set out to get refreshments. When she got to one of the refreshment tables, Viktor and Hermione were there as well.

"That vas a very interesting dance just now, Miss Potter and Miss..."

"Lovegood. Viktor Krum, meet Luna Lovegood. Luna, meet Viktor Krum."

"Hello, Mr. Krum," she said, shaking the boy's hand. "Daddy and I were at the Quidditch World Cup this summer. You are an incredible flyer."

"I know. But I do like hearing it all the same, Miss Lovegood. It is pleasant to meet you."

"Yes, I think you'd like Luna. She treats famous people like regular everyday people, for the most part."

"Ah yes, that is alvays a good thing in a friend, no?"

"Quite," she agreed.

"I'm glad you convinced me to come tonight, Iliana," Luna said. "I'm having a lot of fun. What about you?"

"Oh yes. Aside from Moody pulling me into a dance, it's been fun. And the dance with Moody was... enlightening," she said, giving Hermione a significant glance. Hermione blinked, then nodded.

"Oh, a slow dance," Luna said as the music changed.

On a whim, Iliana held out her hand. "May I have this dance, Miss Lovegood?"

Luna giggled, and took the proffered hand. "Yes, that would be lovely, Miss Potter."

And so, pausing only to put their shoes back on, they spun slowly onto the dance floor together, Iliana leading. She pulled Luna closer, their foreheads touching, both girls giggling as they swayed back and forth, moving gracefully to the slow music.

When the song's pace picked up a bit, they chanced some twirls and the occasional spin, all in giggly excitement.

And then she caught Luna in a perfect dip. She stared down at Luna's face, feeling her cheeks grow very hot, as well as a strange but familiar sensation in her abdomen. Several people catcalled or wolf-whistled, and she felt her entire head and neck grow hot, so she put Luna back up on her feet at once.

"Oh, uh... well that was fun," Iliana said nervously, "but uh, it's Adira's turn now. See you later!"

"Later, Iliana!" Luna said, smiling and waving.

A moment later, Iliana was gone and Adira had taken her place. Adira smiled, said Hi to Luna, and wandered off onto the dance floor.

The ball lasted until past midnight. Al, Adira, and Iliana all got at least two turns there, and even Zoey made an appearance, spending half an hour standing on Sirius's shoes and dancing with him. Everyone there had fun, many couples sneaking off outside to have fun elsewhere, at least until Snape caught most of them and scared the others away.

At the end of the night, Adira went back to her room, barefoot because her feet hurt so much, and the cold stone of the castle soothed them. She was lying on bed to rest a few minutes before changing into her Pjs when there was a faint knock at her door.

"Who 's it?" she slurred, exhausted.

"It's me, Ron. Is it safe to come in?"

"Yeah, you can come in. Whadda ya want?"

He opened the door and came in. "I heard something you should probably know. Lavender and I, er... we went outside around the rosebushes-"

"I don't want to know."

"Oy! This isn't about that. It's something else."

"Fine, what is it?"

"Well, a couple things, really. We overheard Snape having a conversation with Karkaroff. Karkaroff was scared about something, said 'It's been getting clearer all the time' in reference to something on his left arm. And then Snape said, 'Then flee. I shall make your excuses for you.' But it didn't sound like Karkaroff was ready to flee yet."

"Something on his arm? I wonder what that could be about."

"No idea. But there's another thing. We got stuck between a really amorous couple and Snape, and were forced to overhear Hagrid's date with Madam Maxime."

"Awkward. Don't know why I should-"

"Because Hagrid said he's half giant! And he assumed Maxime was too, which she must be, she's as big as he is!"

"Okay. And...?"

Ron spluttered. "AND? Whadda ya mean, _AND_? He's half giant!"

"Well _duh_. I knew the first time I saw him he was at least half giant. I didn't know for sure until now that giants were real, but given that the tallest full-blooded human ever was only nine feet tall, and Hagrid's almost 12 feet tall, it was kind of obvious. I knew he couldn't be full-blooded giant, because he's a wizard, but I knew he had to either have giant blood or he got on the wrong end of an engorgement charm or something as a kid."

Ron sighed. "I keep forgetting how little you know about the wizarding world. Adira, giants are... well, they're like trolls, but worse. Smarter, but violent to the point where they're nearly extinct and yet they still keep attacking and killing each other."

"They can't all be bad. Hagrid's dad had a kid with one. Which, now I'm thinking about it, is something I don't want to think about anymore. I do _not_ want to know how they managed that."

"Yeah well, Hagrid said she abandoned him as a kid, cuz he was too small for her liking."

"God," Adira said, as though Ron hadn't spoken, "I hope Maxime's mom is a giant, too. I don't want to think about it being the other way around, for _so_ many reasons."

"Can you _concentrate_?"

"Why? Hagrid's alright. It wasn't fun that time he tried to put all his considerable tonnage of weight on me last year when he was distraught, but he's alright."

"Well yeah, _we_ know that, but if word ever gets out..."

"How could it? Maxime isn't going to tell. Unless... do you think Lavender will tell?"

"Maybe, I dunno. She was pretty freaked out. I had to remind her that aside from a few eccentricities, Hagrid's a nice bloke. She seemed calmer, then. I asked her not to tell anyone. She said she didn't want to scare anyone, when he's so nice, as I pointed out."

"Hmm... well what about Maxime?"

"Nah, she's _definitely_ not gonna tell anyone. She about had a fit when he assumed she's half giant. Obviously she is, but clearly she's trying to cover it up, which I get. Anyway, I don't know who else was out there, and he was loud enough I don't know who heard. I just have a bad feeling about this."

"Okay," Adira said, sounding very tired.

She rolled over a couple times until she fell out of bed in a controlled sort of way, then rolled onto her back.

"Help me up, please?"

Ron grabbed her hands and pulled her up.

"Thanks. I'm gonna get ready for bed, now. See you later, Ron."

"Right. Bye, Addy."

"Ugh," she said at the hated nickname, turning away when he closed the door.

Because of the Yule Ball the night before, the Hogwarts Express wouldn't leave for the holidays until after lunch, giving people plenty of time to sleep in and still get ready for the trip home. Adira, Ron, and Hermione traded gifts on the train. Adira even gave Luna a couple gifts, one from the collective and one specifically from Iliana. She had also given Dobby the house elf a gift of elf-sized wizard robes, which he had been delighted to receive.

She was in for a surprise when she met Sirius on the platform. She knew he'd be there, because he Apparated home after the ball the night before, but it was how he was dressed that surprised her. In fact, she almost didn't recognize him until he spoke, for he was dressed like a thin, hard rocking Father Christmas in red leather pants with white fur trim, a red and white leather jacket, and a red helmet. He even had the beard, more like a ZZ Top beard than a Santa beard.

"Merry Christmas, Adira!" Sirius shouted, hugging her.

"M-merry Christmas, Sirius. Er... nice outfit."

"Thanks. I had some trouble with the beard. Took a bit too much beard-growth potion, had to trim it down once it finally stopped."

"How long did it get?"

"Let's just say it put Dumbledore's beard to shame. I was the Rapunzel of beards for about an hour."

She giggled at that mental image.

"Anyway, pup, you got your bike leathers on?"

"Yeah, under my robes. Which I forgot to take off."

Shrugging, she pulled her robes off right there, and sure enough, she had her bike leathers on underneath. She folded her robes and put them in her knapsack with her other holiday stuff. As she did, though, she heard a muffled voice complaining.

' _Human, free me from this place!'_

 _'Oh, sorry Aqua,'_ she said in Parseltongue to their pet snake. She was usually curled around her warm rock in their room, but she had to come with them so she could be looked after.

Adira freed Aqua's head from the robes.

 _'So cold!'_

 _'Worry not, I will warm you.'_

She cast a warming charm into a pocket on her vest, and moved the grass snake into the warm pocket.

 _'Thank you, human.'_

 _'You are welcome.'_

"That your pet snake?" Sirius asked, ignoring the Parseltongue.

"Yes, that's Aqua."

"You ready?"

"Yeah, I am now," she said, slinging the knapsack over her back.

"Good."

They left Platform 9 and three quarters, drawing a lot of attention to them with Sirius' outfit. As they left, she wondered how Muggles never noticed groups of kids with trunks and sometimes owls in cages disappearing through the barrier between two platforms, and decided there must be some kind of magic on it that forced Muggles to not notice this oddity, just like they didn't notice The Leaky Cauldron.

Soon enough, they were at Sirius's motorbike.

"Where should we go for dinner?" Sirius asked. "That train ride is long, I know, and sweets don't do much to help hunger."

"Let's get some curry," Adira said.

"Our usual place?"

"Yes."

"Excellent."

They put on their helmets, Sirius got on the bike, and Adira got on behind him and held him round his middle. He revved the engine, and then they were off.

After a meal of curry, they stopped by the house to drop off her knapsack and her pet snake, and then they went for a motorbike ride around the city just for the heck of it for an hour, before heading back because it was dark.

When they got back, they changed into everyday wear then talked for hours, catching up on all the things you couldn't get in a letter. Eventually, the topic came around to the ball.

"So I saw Iliana and Miss Luna Lovegood dancing together several times. Including a slow dance."

"Yeah, it was a lark though. A sudden whim she had. Luna's a good friend for Iliana, she really comes alive around Luna. Did she tell you about the time Luna went into a giggle fit so long she had to go to the hospital wing to get a calming draght?"

"Really? She laughed that long?"

"Yes. And it was... let's see if I remember this right... the third time that month it had happened up to that point."

"Wow. I've seen Luna, she doesn't seem the type for that."

"Yes, she is rather calm, usually. But occasionally her emotions boil over."

There was a knock at the door.

"Hold on, pup."

He got up to check the door, his wand out, and she followed behind him, her own wand out.

"Who's there?"

"It's me, Sirius," said Remus.

"Moony? Come on in," he said, opening the door. Sure enough, it was indeed Remus.

"I tried coming around earlier, but you were out, so I went for a walk to wait for you. I may have gone a bit far afield. How long ago did you get back?"

Sirius closed the door. "About an hour and a half ago, Moony."

"Ah. So I wasn't out quite as long as I feared."

"Sit down, Moony old boy," Sirius said, pulling a chair out for him at the table.

"Thank you, Padfoot old pal."

"We were just talking about the ball."

"Yeah. I can't wait til Colin gets his photos developed. He got loads."

"I'm sure they'll be quite lovely," Remus said.

"Oh hey, by the way..." Adira said, and told them everything Ron had told her the night before about Hagrid and the conversation Snape and Karkaroff had with each other.

"Karkaroff showed Snape something on his arm? Moony, do you know what that's about?"

"No idea, sorry Padfoot."

"That's alright. Hmm... another mystery. Or part of the bigger mystery."

"Adira," Lupin said. "We never got to talk more about what you did for the First Task. Distracting that dragon with _six_ Patronuses, quite impressive."

"Yeah, how'd you hold onto all of them at once? That had to have taken a lot of power out of your shared body."

She shrugged. "I think it's because we transform so frequently. Our body has gotten used to frequent high outputs of magic. I guess that plus the adrenaline worked together to allow for six Patronuses at once."

"I wonder what you're gonna be doing for the Second Task," Sirius mused.

"Oh that, we solved the egg clue. Ah, that reminds me," she said, and explained what she and Moody had talked about during the Yule Ball.

"Ah, I wondered why Iliana and he were dancing. She didn't look too happy about it."

"Yeah, well, she doesn't really like looking at him. Don't tell him we said that, though."

Lupin chuckled. "Your secret is safe with me. But I do confess to being a little disappointed in her for her attitude toward someone so scarred."

"Yeah, well, you have to admit, he's like a walking, talking scar. Compared to him, Moony, you have a couple cute scratches. Don't get me wrong, they make you look distinguished."

"Thank you for that, Adira. Seriously. No Padfoot, don't say it! It got old years ago."

"Eh, you're no fun," Sirius said, putting his feet up on the table.

Endnote: I designed, in my mind, the dresses/dress robes for Al, Javier, Sirius, Remus, Iliana, Luna, Zoey, and Adira. I'm sure they'd look awesome if I could draw them. Maybe I'll do that, sometime. I _am_ an artist as well as a writer. I can't draw clothes as well as I draw people, though, so I had to look online for things that were similar to what I was imagining.

Also, my attempt to describe Iliana's version of Luna's dance is not great. It's actually a kind of dance I do myself sometimes, which should have helped me describe it, but didn't.


	32. Christmas and New Year's

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 32"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-two: Christmas and New Year's**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__ _and %_ _ _Mother%__ _if I get around to it in this chapter._

 _ **Note 4:**_ _I could wish J. K. Rowling would put the rights to Harry Potter in my Yule stocking this year, but the chances of that are so slim, we'd probably see Tronald Dump turn into a decent human being_ _ _ **long**__ _before that ever happened._

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

Adira hadn't noticed it the night before, since she'd mostly been in the kitchen with Sirius and Remus, but the next day she noticed that the whole house was decorated to the nines in tinsel and baubles. A massive tree sat in one corner of the drawing room, bedecked with so many ornaments and other decorations that she wasn't sure what color the tree itself was.

Hanging from the fireplace was three massive stockings, all stuffed to overflowing with gifts. They were labeled 'Moony,' 'Padfoot,' and 'Pup.'

Seeing all the presents under the tree, as well, she felt such an explosion of joy from Zoey that she shrunk and wavered like a bad hologram. She felt Al and Iliana as well, and the wavering intensified. And then-

Sirius awoke with a start to the sound of a very loud BOOM and leaped out of bed and ran downstairs, Remus hot on his heels. The two men skidded to a halt in the drawing room, taking in the sight before them.

It looked like there had been an explosion at a tinsel factory, with tinsel of many different colors strewn every which way. Confetti fell from the ceiling, and they also noticed that all the transfigured clothes Zoey had made for the ball, sans Ron's and Remus's and that of the twins, had been strewn about as well. In the middle of the festive devastation lay Zoey, who wasn't moving.

Sirius bent over to check if Zoey was still alive, Remus anxiously awaiting the answer.

"She's alive. Out cold."

"Oh thank Heavens."

Remus looked around the room as Sirius went to retrieve his wand to wake up Zoey with it. He saw dozens of books had been part of the explosion as well, and worse, there were several fountain pens embedded in the walls.

Finally, Sirius was there to wake her up. _"Rennervate._ "

Zoey blinked awake, very confused, and looked up at Sirius.

"What happened?"

"We were hoping you could tell us," he said, indicating the mess.

She looked around at the mess with wide eyes.

"Er... that's my fault. Too much stuff being held Inside at once, I think. And then when we all got overexcited for Christmas, it must've been the straw that broke the camel's back."

"I should think so. You're not a human trunk, Zoey."

"By the way, if everything Inside you has come out, where's the Philosopher's Stone?" Sirius asked.

Zoey's expression went distant as she checked. When she came back, she said, "It's still in there. It's not like this other stuff. All of this other stuff is at least partly real. The Philosopher's Stone is entirely made of magic. It can only come out by me choosing to give it up. Huh... kinda like a Fidelius Charm secret, that way."

"Ah, well that's a relief."

"Er... I'll clean the mess, shall I?" Zoey said, after looking around a bit.

"On Christmas? Naw, I can do it," Sirius said, using his wand to clean up the mess and organize the books into piles.

"You surprise me all the time, Padfoot," Remus said. "I didn't know you even _knew_ that spell, much less how to do it so well."

"I've had lots of time living by myself to practice," he said.

"Still haven't got a job?" she asked. "I know you don't need one for the money, but you need something to do with yourself. Maybe private security or something, if not an auror."

"You should be an auror, Padfoot. Mad-Eye would be disappointed to know all that training is going to waste."

"Well... maybe. I'll help get Addy through this Tournament first, then maybe look into it."

"Good. It's not good for you to be cooped up in here by yourself all the time."

"You think I stay in here all the time, Moony? HA! What a laugh. No, I still go out to eat at least once a week, and sometimes I go for a ride on my motorbike. And I go to Muggle London sometimes and people-watch or have a chat with people, or to a Muggle pub. Hey, did you know the Muggles have been building a tunnel under the English Channel? They're saying it's going to open next year. Then we could take a train from Britain to France, maybe go on a trip around the mainland."

"A tunnel under the water? Did you really think we'd fall for that one, Padfoot?"

"No I'm not joking, they really _are_ building a tunnel under the channel. They're already calling it the Chunnel. I've seen it on the Muggle news, they've got these great big machines with enormous drills on the end, boring through the rock."

"He _could_ be joking, I guess," said Zoey, "But it _does_ sound like somethin' the Muggles could and would do. I mean, I'm pretty sure that Britain was connected to the mainland back during the Ice Age, then the glaciers melted and made the channel. So it _could_ be shallow enough to make a tunnel underneath it."

"If you don't believe me, Moony, you can go to one of these Muggle pubs and look on the telly. In fact, I wonder if we could get a telly in here?"

"I doubt it, Padfoot, with all the wards you have on this place. Too much magic. Not nearly as bad as Hogwarts, since Hogwarts is on a ley line or two, but bad enough to interfere with the reception. But I'll take you up on going to a Muggle pub sometime, ask around about this Chunnel. Dumbledore's convinced Voldemort is gearing up for a comeback, so having a non-magical way out of the country is always useful information if you're telling the truth."

Sirius sighed. "The curse of being an incorrigible prankster is people don't believe me when I tell them something incredible but true."

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf," Zoey said.

They all laughed at that.

"Anyway, we should have breakfast before presents. You can get into your stocking, pup, if you really can't wait."

"Goody!"

She ran to the stocking and grabbed it, dumping the contents out on the floor and digging excitedly through them. There were fruits, and magical candies from Honeyduke's, and a chocolate orange, as well as some striped socks for Zoey, some Zonko's products, and wizarding crackers. She pulled on one, making it go off with a bang. It left behind some living toy soldiers in a box. Other crackers produced an American style 10-gallon hat, some live white mice (one of which got snatched up and swallowed by Aqua the grass snake), pink cowboy boots, a tiny little miniature piano that produced the same loud, rich sound as a Grand Piano, and rounded sunglasses with daisy-petal shaped petals around them that had flashing lights in multiple colors.

Zoey sat in front of the tiny piano with her knees up by her chin while wearing the hat, the sunglasses, and the boots, and said, "Look at me! I'm Beethoven from the _Peanuts_ cartoon!"

Remus, who had a little more experience with Muggles, chuckled at this as he watched her bang out a discordant tune on the piano, the music filling the whole house. Sirius just looked confused.

She spent the time until breakfast trying to play 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' on the piano. Then she rushed over at the smell of cooking bacon. Before long, she was eating scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast.

"Nothing's burnt!" she pointed out excitedly. "And nothing's raw, either! It's all delicious!"

"Yes, like I said, I've had a lot of time to myself. Gotta keep busy."

"He _can_ be taught!" Remus said with a grin, between bites.

"Hush, you, or I'll fill your bed with dead fish."

"Do that, Padfoot, and I'll have you fixed."

"As the Americans say, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'"

"Good thing I'm not broke anymore," Remus said. "Of course, I'm not exactly wealthy, either. Teachers don't earn much money to begin with, and I've been saving most of what I've been earning in a savings account at Gringott's."

"Whyzat?" asked Zoey.

"I don't want to trouble you," he said, suddenly embarrassed.

"Out with it, Moony," Sirius said, suddenly living up to his name.

Remus sighed. "Well if you _must_ know, it's a sort of insurance. I've been doing it since I first got the Defense position."

"Insurance? What do you mean, insurance?"

"The Ministry knows what I am, and there's some anti-werewolf legislation being debated in the Wizengamot, which was introduced by some horrible woman named Umbridge. If it passes, I won't be able to work at Hogwarts anymore."

"Oh no! That's horrible!" Zoey said.

Sirius, for his part, had choked on his food, and spent a couple minutes recovering. Finally, though, he managed to speak.

"Damn! I'll have to take my family's seat on the Wizengamot, then. I was hoping I wouldn't have to, because I hate politics. Also, I'll have to face Narcissa and her husband to get it back from them."

"Your seat on the Wizengamot is held by a Death Eater family and you didn't claim it sooner?" Zoey asked, horrified.

"I _really_ hate politics. Also, to be honest, I forgot about it until now."

"Al wants to know if _we_ have a seat on the Wizengamot."

"Hmm... I don't know if the Potter family had a Wizengamot seat or not. I'll have to ask. I think so, but I'm not sure."

"They do, Padfoot. James certainly talked about it enough. He wasn't much for politics either, but he was proud that his family had such high connections. But I don't know its current status."

"Something else to do, then," Zoey said. "Let me know ASAP, okay Sirius?"

"Sure thing. I'll start asking after the holidays."

"Cool. Thanks!"

After breakfast, they opened presents. It was a mixed lot. Zoey and company got some books, more clothes, the usual package of sweets and sweaters from the Weasleys, some sweets from Remus and Sirius, a set of Gobstones, and a small pouch that fit on a necklace but was magically bigger on the inside with a stretchable lip that could fit some really ridiculously large things in it. Zoey immediately went over to the pile of books that had exploded out of her earlier and put them into the pouch, giggling every time the pouch stretched to swallow it. No matter how much was added to it, its weight remained the same. They also got a gift from Dobby, who had sent them by school owl along with a note he'd clearly dictated to someone else, explaining that they were socks he'd knitted himself. The left sock was bright red and had a pattern of broomsticks upon it; the right sock was green with a pattern of Snitches. They added Dobby to the thank-you note list, and later that day quickly sent Dobby a return gift of a mismatched pair of socks they were fairly sure wouldn't disappear in a few weeks, at least not by any failing transformations, anyway.

But by far the best gift was a magical two-way mirror from Sirius, that he and James used to use at Hogwarts to communicate during separate detentions.

"I hope you lot appreciate this, and keep it safe. I went back to my parents' old house with a few old friends from the auror guard and some of their friends and fought off all kinds of nasty things to find it. Also, they're a little hard to come by. I _could_ afford a new set, but they're expensive, and since I already had a set - and it had sentimental value - I figured it was worth the effort to retrieve them."

"Cool," Zoey said in awe, taking it in her hand. "Thanks!"

"You're welcome. Now for how it works. I've got the other one. Just say my name around yours, preferably in the same room, and I'll hear you and be able to respond if I can. And see where I've got mine?"

He pulled on a chain around his neck, to which his mirror was attached.

"Cool!"

"Don't worry too hard about breaking yours, they're charmed unbreakable. It would take a mighty powerful spell to break one, like an Unforgivable, or basilisk venom. I think the only _other_ way to break one would be if the other one was already broken or dead for some reason. They're paired, including the runes, so if for some reason the runes on one of them fail, the runes on the other will fail as well. But the runes are pretty potent, and strengthen each other, so I don't think it very likely yours will ever break. The high quality is why they're so hard to find, and why they're so expensive."

"It's a little heavy for a necklace, though, isn't it?"

"Featherlight charm on mine. It's one of the charms I'm good at. I've got it just heavy enough to notice if I were to lose it, and light enough it isn't uncomfortable."

"Thanks again!"

"You're welcome. And you should put it in your pouch, at least for now."

"Will do," she said, shoving it into the deceptively small-looking pouch.

After that, she spent the rest of the day sans meals trying to teach herself the Peanuts theme song on her tiny piano.

Remus normally slept at Hogwarts, but since he'd been invited to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas night at the house Sirius shared with the Potter collective, he was sleeping in one of the guest bedrooms. Or more accurately, he'd been _trying_ to sleep, and not having a lot of luck. He'd been asleep only an hour or two when a noise from Sirius's bedroom had woken him and sent him running to see what the matter was. He looked into the partly-open door of his friend's bedroom and seen Sirius in the midst of a post-Azkaban nightmare, rolling around moaning, and kicking at his covers while looking like he was trying to ward off something looming over him. Not knowing what to do, Remus froze in place and tried to think. After a minute or two of frantic thought, he realized Adira and the others might have experience with this, since they'd spent more time living here than he had.

But if he did that, he realized, he'd be waking both of them up, and he didn't want to do that unless he had to. So instead, he racked his brain for anything they might've told him in any of their talks with him that might indicate what to do.

Finally, though, he decided to just try talking Sirius awake.

"Sirius. Sirius! You're having a nightmare! It's not real! Wake up!"

It took a couple more tries of this before it worked, Sirius bolting upright out of his nightmare.

"Moony? What's wrong?"

"You were having a nightmare, Padfoot old friend."

"Oh. Yeah. Thanks, Moony."

"I'm glad to be able to help. Did I do it right?"

"Yes. I dunno if Addy ever told you or not, but just so you know, touching me awake is a bad idea. Your instincts are still good, Moony, when you don't over-think things."

"Thanks, Padfoot. Do you need anything?"

"No thanks, I'll be fine. I'll just curl up as a dog in the doggie bed at the foot of Addy's bed. I do that even when she's not here. Go back to bed, Moony."

"That I will. Sweet dreams, Padfoot."

"Thanks, I can use all the help I can get."

Sirius turned into a dog, then, and padded his way to Addy's room and got comfortable in the dog bed, falling asleep quickly.

Before long, Lupin was peering in on the two of them from the open doorway. He couldn't see Zoey for all the blankets she had on over her, but he could see her form moving regularly up and down with her slow breathing. He watched for several minutes before quietly leaving.

As much as Lupin wanted to go back to sleep, though, finding Sirius in the midst of a nightmare had unsettled him, so he went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of herbal tea, some chamomile to ease his nerves. It took him almost an entire hour to feel well enough to go back up to his room and try for sleep again.

On his way back, he heard a sound from Addy's room: several bumps, a small squeak, and other small noises he couldn't identify, so he went back to investigate. He looked inside but saw nothing amiss; Sirius was still asleep in his dog form in the dog bed on the floor, and Zoey was still asleep. The only difference now was that he could see the back of her head, and the covers looked a little askew. Deciding she'd just knocked into the headboard in her sleep, he went back to bed and was soon asleep again.

When they woke up the morning after Christmas, it was as Adira. It was a bit off-putting to wake up with her glasses on her face already, but it was getting to be a semi-regular occurrence for her whenever they would switch to her in the night. Sighing, she got up and crossed the room to use the bathroom. As she did, she noticed Sirius was still sleeping as a dog in his doggy bed. She didn't want to wake him, so she took some clothes with her into the bathroom to change there.

At breakfast, Lupin told her about Sirius's nightmare the night before, and how he'd managed to stumble onto the right thing to do on his own, which made her smile.

Halfway through the meal, she yawned loudly. Lupin looked at her, concerned.

"That's at least the tenth time this morning you've yawned, possibly much more, since I don't know how many you did before I started to notice. Are you feeling alright?"

"Yeah, just a little tired is all. It's not a big deal, it happens sometimes."

"How late were you up last night?" Sirius asked from the doorway, where he'd just come in.

She sighed. "Zoey conked out around 11 last night."

"And when did you wake up?"

She sighed even louder. "At eight AM. Honestly, Sirius, I'm fine. Some nights we just don't sleep as well as others. Probably nightmares. From things other people said before I got my own dorm room, I gather I sometimes have nightmares without remembering I've had them in the morning. _We_ do, I mean," she said. "Ugh, tenses and pronouns and stuff like that are weird when you're not the only one in your head."

"Ah, okay. Yes, that makes sense," Sirius said. "I know I've been a little tired myself this morning, after the night I had last night. Thanks again for helping out, Moony."

"No problem, Padfoot my friend."

Addy finished up the last of her breakfast.

"Want third helpings?" Sirius offered.

"No thanks, I'm stuffed. Your cooking is getting pretty good, though, so it was tempting. Anyway, I'm gonna read," she said, getting up and starting toward the door.

"Put your dishes in the sink before you go."

"Yeah, yeah, I will," she said lazily as she turned around to comply.

Adira spent most of the morning writing thank-you notes for people who had given her gifts, and sent one for Hermione off with Hedwig, and used Sirius's owl Pigwidgeon to send Ron his. Then she spent the rest of the day reading a novel in the drawing room, pausing only for meals and to send other thank-you notes off when one of the owls returned from previous trips. She was still reading after dinner when Sirius came in.

"Hey, Addy, how are you?"

"I'm good. And you?"

"I'm good, too. 'Lord of the Rings,' eh? I've heard of that before, but I don't think I've ever read it."

"Yeah, it's pretty good. I almost didn't get past this one part in the first book, though. Tom Bombadill," she said with a disgusted sigh. "Most pointless character in a book I've ever come across. Most annoying, too. And the poems in the book are annoying, too. Luckily there aren't _too_ many of those, and mostly in the first half of the first book."

"You don't like poetry?"

"I like _some_ poetry. Short poems. Tolkein's poems are _long,_ though. And difficult to read."

"Ah. But otherwise a good book?"

"Excellent book, yes, aside from those small details."

"Good to know. By the way, since we're talking about books, I can't find one of the books from our library. It was one of the books I rescued from my parents' place, and one of the few things worth keeping around."

"Which book is missing?"

"One of Newt Scamander's more obscure books. Along with 'Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them,' he also wrote a whole series of books going into a lot of detail about various topics. I rescued the entire series from that old house, except for a pair that got eaten by doxies. Twelve books in all, out of a set of 14. The missing book was the size of a large dictionary and was all about the magical ecosystems on and around the grounds of Hogwarts."

"Really? Sounds useful. If you find it, let me know; I want to read it."

"Okay, as long as you let me know if you find it, too."

"Of course," she said.

"Good. I'll leave you to your reading, then."

The rest of the holiday was spent doing mostly various activities together, the three of them. Sirius had convinced Lupin to stay for the rest of the holiday, and they spent the days either helping Adira with her dueling, going out for curries or pizza, trying to help Adira with the Animagus transformation (which was still giving her/them trouble), or visiting the malls in Muggle London. A few times they even went on motorbike rides together, with Adira in the sidecar as Lupin rode behind Sirius the first time. But Lupin didn't like that position, and ended up switching with Adira during the other trips. He barely fit, so it was pretty hilarious.

"You know, it's weird," she said one of these times after they were parked, "but Hagrid says he rode this motorbike while carrying me on the night my parents died, but it's pretty much a normal sized bike, and he's _enormous._ Nearly twelve feet tall, and riding a bike made for someone half his size."

Sirius barked several times with laughter, and Lupin began to chuckle a little before both men tried to hold their laughter in until they could get into the flat.

"Are you picturing an enormous Hagrid hunched over this comparatively tiny bike, too?" she asked with a wide grin.

"Yes, I am," Sirius said, snorting with suppressed laughter. "I hadn't thought of it when I loaned it to him that night, because I was distraught and already planning to try to murder Peter in revenge, and I didn't see him get on it, but yeah, he's so large... and the bike is so... {snerk} tiny, compared to... {snort} compared to him..."

He couldn't contain his laughter again, and started to laugh so hard that he fell to the ground, clutching a stitch in his side. Remus and Adira were soon down on the ground, too, laughing til their faces turned red as tomatoes, and breathing became difficult.

When they finally got control of themselves, Adira spoke again.

"Oh my goodness, I don't know whether to tell Luna that or not. On the one hand, we like the sound of her laughter. On the other hand, she'd probably be in the hospital wing for a week-long laugh attack if we did."

"Ah... ah yes. Well, now I'm thinking more clearly, he probably put an engorgement charm on it with that umbrella of his. By the way, that reminds me... from what you told me about your second year, that reminds me I need to look into getting Hagrid trained up so he can be a fully-qualified wizard. Voldemort ruined his life, but maybe we can recover some of that for him."

"Oh yeah, that's a great idea! I'll remind you about it later. In fact," she said, pulling out a small notebook from the pouch around her neck, "I'm gonna write myself a note about that so I don't forget."

"Write one for me, too, if you don't mind tearing a page out of it. Ah, thanks," he said, taking a page from her and putting it in a pocket of the Muggle-style jacket he was wearing.

They went the rest of the way to their 'flat' – which, being so obviously magical and big on the inside, always felt like a house to her – in the kind of silence that often followed an especially powerful bout of laughter. Sirius put his key in the lock, opened the door, and was just stepping inside when Adira spoke again.

"Hey, Sirius? Remus?"

"What, pup?" Sirius said, both men turning to look at her.

She mimed hunching over and grabbing a tiny handlebar with her arms, her elbows jutting out comically, and said, "Meep, meep! Vroom, vroom! Putt-putt-putt!"

The sound of their raucous laughter filled the corridors for nearly a quarter of an hour.

They'd thought, once, that their best Christmas ever had been their first one at Hogwarts, but naturally their first one with Sirius and Remus that year replaced it. They didn't even spend all their time at home, visiting the Weasleys several days out of the holidays via the Floo. They got to find out in person how the Weasleys had liked the gifts they'd gotten for them. Both Percy and Mr. Weasley had been especially impressed and fascinated by the matching locking briefcases they'd gotten for the two Ministry employees from a Muggle shop in London. They'd tried to refuse, of course, but Adira pointed out that she had more money than she needed, and it was Christmas, so they finally accepted the gifts. She'd had a similar problem with one of her gifts for Lupin, another briefcase, and she'd finally had to tell him it had only cost her the equivalent of 7 galleons before he'd accepted it. By comparison, the two Weasley men were a piece of cake to convince.

But of course, the holidays couldn't last forever. New Year's came and went, with the three of them making so much noise in the house that Aqua complained later to her that it had woken her out of a nap. Sirius even found that book he'd been looking for a couple days before the train, giving her the chance to make a copy for herself. And all too soon, Adira was packing up to head back to Hogwarts.

The train ride had been pretty quiet, all things considered. They were even blessed to not have to put up with Malfoy or his goons at all, aside from a near miss on the way to their compartment. They continued to be able to avoid him and his ilk as they took the carriages back up to the school and had dinner. Nothing unusual happened at all, unless you counted the fact she'd noticed a couple books she didn't recognize that had been in her pouch, which she discovered while transferring them to her trunk, but she brushed it off as having not paid enough attention to them before.

Hermione was no more surprised or bothered than Adira had been when Ron told her the next day about Hagrid being a half-giant, since he'd forgotten to mention it on the train with all the talk about the Yule Ball. He still looked a bit put out by their casual lack of concern about Hagrid being part giant, but otherwise didn't say anything else about it.

Even though they'd solved the egg clue, on this side of January first, Al and the others were feeling nervous. February was coming, and none of them fancied trying to figure out how to deal with the cold. Sure, there was the Warming Charm, but it didn't work as well in the water. They'd done tests in the tub during the holidays, and while breathing in the water was solved by Tier, the cold was still an issue. They'd have to re-cast the Warming Charm every few minutes, and since they couldn't afford the distraction that would be, they'd have to find some other way of keeping warm. A wet-suit would have been nice, if they'd remembered to buy one when in London. But they weren't sure Sirius would be up to finding one, especially since they wouldn't be there to get the right kind of sizing done. Their fluctuating size depending on who was Out meant they'd have to pick ahead of time which one of them would do it, most likely. And since those plans sometimes went right out the window, that wasn't something they could rely on.

Snow was still thick upon the grounds, and the greenhouse windows were covered in condensation so thick that they couldn't see out of them in Herbology. Nobody was looking forward to Care of Magical Creatures much in this weather, especially Al.

When they arrived at Hagrid's cabin, however, they found an elderly witch with closely cropped gray hair and a very prominent chin standing before his front door.

"Hurry up, now, the bell rang five minutes ago," she barked at them as they struggled toward her through the snow.

"Who're you?" said Ron, staring at her. "Where's Hagrid?"

"My name is Professor Grubbly-Plank," she said briskly. "I am your temporary Care of Magical Creatures teacher."

"Where's Hagrid?" Al repeated loudly.

"He is indisposed," said Professor Grubbly-Plank shortly.

Soft and unpleasant laughter reached Al's ears. He turned; Draco Malfoy and the rest of the Slytherins were joining the class. All of them looked gleeful, and none of them looked surprised to see Professor Grubbly-Plank.

Al asked her what was wrong with Hagrid, and she brushed him off. So he focused on Hagrid's hut with his empathic sense. It was difficult, with all the interference from the rest of the class, but he thought he felt despondency and sorrow coming from the hut.

"Something's happened to Hagrid," Al whispered at his friends. "I don't know what, but he feels sad about something."

"Oh my goodness, I hope he's alright."

"Yeah, me too," Ron said, glancing over at the Slytherins.

"Worried about your big oaf of a friend, Potter?" Malfoy said.

Al whipped his head around toward Malfoy at these words and pulled a face at him that made the blond boy pause in fear a moment before regaining his nerve and continuing with false bravado.

Malfoy put his hand inside the pocket of his robes and pulled out a folded page of newsprint.

"There you go," he said. "Hate to break it to you, Potter."

He jumped back but still smirked as Al snatched the page, unfolded it, and read it, with Ron, Seamus, Dean, and Neville looking over his shoulder. It was an article topped with a picture of Hagrid looking extremely shifty.

It was standard Skeeter fare. She made Hagrid out to be a horrible monster who loved tormenting kids with dangerous beasts in his class. It told about the skrewts and that they were indeed an illegal hybrid, but failed to mention that they were dead now. It also failed to mention that Hagrid's classes were pretty much a normal person's idea of normal now, ever since the skrewts. Admittedly, who knew if that would last past Hagrid's mourning period, but still, it should have been mentioned.

And, of course, the article not only outed Hagrid as half giant ("how did she find out?"), but also figured out and revealed the name of his mother, a giantess named Fridwulfa, who at least had not been one of the giants working with Voldemort during the war, choosing instead to remain neutral. Skeeter also used the wrong name for them, calling them "Harry," but that was barely worth noticing.

Al was so angry as he read, and as the Slytherins laughed, that he didn't notice his left arm coming up and pointing with three fingers at Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle. His head jerked around once he heard the screams, though.

"Whazahuh?" Al said, confused, as he took in the scene. Then, when he figured out what Chandra had done, he burst out laughing.

Chandra, in an uncharacteristic fit of pique, had used one of his experimental spells on them, causing Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle to become 'magnetically' attracted to each other, and Malfoy – the smallest of the three – was stuck between the other two, being squeezed til his whole head and neck were going red.

Of course, the whole class had gone mad at this, with half the students either laughing their arses off or looking torn between amusement and concern, and the other half in various states of outrage. Pansy Parkinson and Millicent Bulstrode were attempting to pull the three boys apart, but they couldn't get a good enough grip on them to really try, as even the boys' robes were affected by the spell. And of course Grubbly-Plank was trying to restore order and help, but the cage of fairies she'd been carrying over had fallen, and angry escaped fairies were buzzing loudly and flying at people's faces.

With another gesture from Al's left hand, the three stuck boys then started to fly straight into the air like someone had let go of a balloon underwater. They didn't go far, though, and stopped just out of reach of even the tallest person in class, having bobbed a little higher first.

Al didn't catch much of what happened after that, because he was too busy having fallen down onto the ground from laughing so hard. It wasn't until a very firm hand grabbed him by the arm and jerked him up that he stopped, immediately going into defense mode, his wand out.

"Don't you wield your wand at me, Mr. Potter!" snapped Professor McGonagall, who was looking furious.

"Er, sorry, Professor. I thought I was being attacked." He immediately put his wand away.

"Explain yourself," she snapped again, gesturing at the three boys still floating in the air out of reach.

Suppressing his laughter with difficulty, he explained that they'd been saying nasty things about Hagrid, and Chandra had acted without informing the rest of them.

"So, er... he's the only one who can undo it. Probably. I mean, Moody might be able to work it out, though, given enough time."

"Mr. Rahasyamay, will you please undo these spells right now." It was not a question, but a command.

Al felt his consciousness being pulled aside gently but firmly as Chandra took over without transforming.

"If the White Ferret and his twin dancing trolls all promise to apologize in front of the Great Hall for their unkind words, then I shall release them from these spells."

Her line a thin mouth, McGonagall nonetheless looked up at the floating Slytherins, then back at Chandra and Al.

"They do not appear to be in any condition to speak right now, being too distressed. Please undo the spells now. _Carefully_ ," she emphasized.

"While I would not be averse to complying for your sake, Tartan Grandmother, I do not, as such, have a counter to either of these spells. Truth be told, I have not even used that particular floating spell before, and I am unsure how I have done it."

"You mean you've never used that spell before? Are you saying it's accidental magic? Are we going to have to call in the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad?"

"The first spell, of attraction, is not accidental. Wandless, yes, but not accidental. The second... I am unsure. I did do it on purpose, also without a wand, but since I am not sure what I did, I suppose it qualifies as accidental magic by certain definitions."

"If that is the case, Mr. Rahasyamay, why did you say you would free them if they apologized?"

"Hmm... I do not know."

McGonagall blinked at him. He placidly stared back. Then the professor pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. She was also muttering to herself, part of which sounded to them like "...why I even took this job to begin with..." and then "...even James and Sirius weren't this much..."

"Dumbledore!" someone shouted.

Everyone who wasn't distracted catching fairies or trying to get Malfoy and his goons down turned to look. Sure enough, Dumbledore was walking across the grounds to investigate the trouble.

"Again, Mr. Rahasyamay? And in the same class, no less."

"Yes. Sorry, Silver Grandfather."

Dumbledore waved away their concern and looked closely at the three floating Slytherins. He used his wand to try to sort out what spell was used. He soon had them back on the ground, but they were still stuck to each other like rare-earth magnets.

"Fascinating variant of the levitation charm," he said when he was done. "You and I should work out how to recreate it, as it could win you some spellcrafting awards, Mr. Rahasyamay. Sadly, though, I have no idea what to do about the other spell, just yet. That shall take a bit longer to work out."

"How long, Professor?" asked a tearful Pansy Parkinson, her worry over Malfoy supplanting her dislike of Dumbledore.

"Several days, I believe. Twenty-four hours if I push myself, I think."

"Perhaps I should try instead?" Chandra offered.

"You might as well. It is likely the fastest way."

Chandra considered the three Slytherins thoughtfully. After a few moments, he stepped forward and touched them, feeling around as though looking for something.

"Aha," he said at last, pulling on a suddenly-appearing sheet of shimmering orange light. He separated several other colors of sparkling light, pinning them down in various positions to keep them from snapping back in place. Then he pulled a yellow layer out and off the three boys like removing a piece of translucent cloth from them; it vanished once he let go of it. He did this again for a blue layer, then for a violet layer. Once the violet layer fell away, the orange layer popped like a soap bubble, and the three boys fell to the ground, freed.

"Mr. Rahasyamay," Dumbledore said in a voice of forced calm, "I am very impressed by that. That was very advanced practical arithmancy you just performed, and you did it wandlessly. It is even more impressive that the spell did not explode when you did that."

" _EXPLODE?!_ " Pansy shrieked in horror. "YOU ALMOST _KILLED_ THEM?!"

"I was not aware of the danger, Sniveling Sycophant," he said, addressing Pansy with a glower. "I was not even aware I could do that. None of us are taking Arithmancy, so far as I am aware."

"You're quite right, Mr. Rahasyamay, we do not have any of you down for Arithmancy classes," Dumbledore said.

Al turned to look at Professor McGonagall, having felt a mix of emotions from her that he was having trouble classifying, or even feeling clearly with all the empathic noise in the area at the moment. She was looking at them with a very thoughtful expression on her face, like they'd said something so fascinating that it made her get lost in thought. But he couldn't think why that would be, so he ignored it for now.

Dumbledore had Pansy and a couple other Slytherins take Malfoy and his two trained baboons down to the Hospital Wing to be checked over, then turned to Al.

"For your punishment, Mr. Rahasyamay, I will be giving you a detention this Wednesday at 7 o'clock, in my office. Do not be late."

"Understood, Silver Grandfather."

Nodding at them, Dumbledore turned and headed back up toward the castle. Professor McGonagall did a double-take in surprise and then followed the headmaster.

With Dumbledore and McGonagall gone, Al walked over to Lavender, Ron and Hermione trailing behind. She looked at him curiously at first, then with fear as she noticed his expression. She jumped back, holding her hands in front of herself placatingly.

"It wasn't me! I swear I didn't tell _anyone!_ Not even my diary! I just wanted to forget about it, honestly!"

Al blinked, sensing her sincerity.

"I believe you," he said.

"No really, I- wait, you _do_?"

"Empath here. Unless you've somehow learned Mastery-level occlumency over the holidays, you're telling the truth, I can feel it."

"What's occlumency?" she asked, confused.

"Never mind."

The rest of the class was uneventful, after that. At lunch, they argued about how Skeeter had found out, wondering things like if she had an invisibility cloak.

"I'd say she's bugging the place," Al said, "but she can't be; electronics go mad around here. Unless there are magical ways to do it? I could ask Sirius tonight on the mirror, I suppose."

"Good thinking, Al," said Hermione.

"Thanks. Also, we should go visit Hagrid after Divination. Tell him we want him back."

"I agree," Hermione said. "Especially as he's been a lot better since the skrewt incident."

When the three of them got up later to go back to classes, they ran into Moody in the corridor. Luckily it was only figuratively running into him, as he probably would have hexed them into oblivion otherwise.

"Glad I found you, Potter," Moody said. "If you'll come with me, Potter, we need to discuss those hexes of Chandra's earlier, and a stern talking-to about not using spells you don't know what they do wouldn't go amiss, either."

"Er, now, Professor? I need to go to class."

"I'll write your teacher a note for you. Come on, let's not take all day."

Al sighed, and followed Moody.

"See you later, Al!" his friends called back.

Moody didn't take Al to his office, but pulled him into an unused classroom. Once he was sure the room was secure, Moody turned to Al to speak.

"This isn't really about those hexes, Potter. I reckon Dumbledore will set you straight on that later. What I really wanted was an excuse to hand you this," he said, holding out a roll of parchment.

"What is it?" Al asked, not yet taking it.

"Just a piece of parchment with a list on it, Potter, but I'm glad to see you're remaining vigilant. Take it, it's for you."

Al took it, unrolled it, and read it. It was a list of books to get from the library. There was also a signed permission slip from Moody on it.

"Some of these books are in the Restricted Section, hence the note. I transfigured my writing on the list itself to look more like yours, enough to pass a cursory inspection anyway. Did that so we could claim you already knew what to look for, instead of cheating by asking advice from a teacher. All you asked me for was the permission to get these books for the Tournament, understood? If anyone asks you how you knew what to get, tell them your godfather found the titles for you."

"Er, okay. Thanks," he said, reading the list to himself.

"Books about the science of otter fur? Dolphin anatomy?"

"Yes. Remember the talk I had with Iliana during the ball?"

"Yeah, I do. Ooh, books on mermaids, that makes sense. '101 Easy Underwater Defense Spells,' cool. 'Curses of the Water-Tribes of Malaysia'? What's that one about? I mean, water tribes of Malaysia, that's the part I don't get."

"There's some tribes in Malaysia that spend most of their time underwater, diving up to 20 meters for food and other things, without the use of spells or equipment, called 'free-diving.' They can hold their breath for three minutes at a time. Their free-diving techniques would be too involved for you to learn yet, but luckily you don't need to. Anyway, some of those tribes have wizards and witches among them, and there's even a few all-wizarding tribes there, that's the people these curses come from."

"Neat!"

"Now, these tribes don't consider the spells in this book to be dark, but European wizarding culture does, which is why the book is restricted. But it's useful magic to learn, even if a lot of it is pretty advanced. Though with your familiarity with wandless magic, I think you'll be able to manage more of these than most would. Bring the book to me when you get it, and I can point out the ones you should be able to learn before the Second Task."

"Thank you, Professor."

"Don't mention it. No really, literally don't mention it. Cheating may be a traditional part of the Tournament, but that doesn't protect you if you get caught."

Al nodded. Then Moody told him to get to his next class soon, so he did, excited to get these books out. And there were even more than the ones he'd already read back to Moody.

That evening after dinner, Al, Ron, and Hermione left the castle once more and went down through the frozen grounds to Hagrid's cabin. They knocked, and Fang's booming barks answered.

"Hagrid, it's us!" Al shouted, pounding on the door. "Open up!

Hagrid didn't answer. They could hear Fang scratching at the door, whining, but it didn't open. They hammered on it for ten more minutes; Ron even went and banged on one of the windows, but there was no response.

"What's he avoiding _us_ for?" Hermione said when they had finally given up and were walking back to the school. "He surely doesn't think we'd care about him being half-giant?"

But it seemed that Hagrid did care. They didn't see a sign of him all week. He didn't appear at the staff table at mealtimes, they didn't see him going about his gamekeeper duties on the grounds, and Professor Grubbly-Plank continued to take the Care of Magical Creatures classes.

Malfoy looked like he wanted to gloat whenever he saw them, but perhaps feared that Al or Chandra would take over and glue him to the ceiling by his underpants, so he said nothing.

Sirius hadn't had any ideas about how Skeeter could be getting into the school to dig up dirt on people, but he promised to look into it and get back to them if he found anything promising.

Dumbledore's detention turned out to be private instruction in wandless magic, which involved the headmaster handing them a large stack of books to read. They put some of the volumes back, having read them already or being in the middle of them. Some of the others weren't familiar, but gave them a strange sense of deja vu that intensified with every sentence they read, which was so distracting that they gave up and chose other volumes to read instead. They also took copious notes, since none of the books were to leave Dumbledore's office. At the end of the detention, Dumbledore told them to return next Wednesday at 7, but specified that only this first one was counting as a detention on their record.

Later on in the week, of course, was more Occlumency lessons with Dumbledore. They'd gotten worse over the holidays, having forgotten to practice, and saw flashes of several things; Zoey looking around at the results of her explosion over the holidays, fighting Quirrell, flying during Quidditch, an image of sneaking around the library at night in the invisibility cloak, and scenes from the Yule Ball, among others. Dumbledore set them extra homework on Occlumency and reminded them to practice as much as possible.

Dueling Club kept going, too, and Moody began teaching them about how to take advantage of your personal talents, which among other things included him saying that people who expected to be attacked a lot could carry magical artifacts to distract enemies with. He looked at them when he said this, but also glanced at a thoughtful-looking Javier.

Halfway through January, there was a Hogsmeade visit, and the three of them went as usual. After reading some of the books Moody suggested, they had started experimenting with various forms to try to manage in the cold water, but Tier's shape-shifting wasn't great at the kind of anatomy they needed. He couldn't get the blubber right on porpoise forms, his attempts at otter fur were a failure, and the closest he could get to an actual dolphin form bore more of a resemblance to prehistoric proto-whales than to modern cetaceans. These failures were making them nervous.

Iliana, Ron, and Hermione left the castle together on Saturday and set off through the cold, wet grounds toward the gates. As they passed the Durmstrang ship moored in the lake, they saw Viktor Krum emerge onto the deck, dressed in nothing but swimming trunks. He was very skinny indeed, but apparently a lot tougher than he looked, because he climbed up onto the side of the ship, stretched out his arms, and dived, right into the lake.

Iliana stared at this, mouth agape. Krum must have some way of keeping warm in the cold water, but even though she and Krum were somewhat friendly with each other, she wasn't sure Krum would want to share that information with them. If they got a chance, though, they decided it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Keeping her eyes peeled for Hagrid on their way to town, she was disappointed to not see the large man in any of the shops. So she suggested going to The Three Broomsticks.

The pub was as crowded as ever, but one quick look around at all the tables told Iliana that Hagrid wasn't there. Heart sinking, she went up to the bar with Ron and Hermione, and ordered three butter-beers from Madam Rosmerta.

"Doesn't he _ever_ go into the office?" Hermione whispered suddenly. "Look!"

She pointed into the mirror behind the bar, and Iliana saw Ludo Bagman reflected there, sitting in a shadowy corner with a bunch of goblins. Bagman was talking very fast in a low voice to the goblins, all of whom had their arms crossed and were looking rather menacing.

Iliana giggled, a memory coming to them.

"What is it?" Ron asked.

"Do you know something?"

"Yes. Zoey intercepted one of Fred and George's letters to Bagman, and-"

"Fred and George are writing _Bagman?_ Why?"

"I was about to tell you when you interrupted," she said icily.

"Sorry. Go on."

"Anyway, it turns out Bagman paid them in leprechaun gold, which vanishes. They thought it was an innocent mistake at first, in their first, very polite letter, but he's been stonewalling them. I'd be willing to bet he's having a similar issue with the goblins."

"Oh yeah, I think I heard something from Dad about people having a hard time getting money from Bagman. He's got a gambling problem, I guess."

"Also," Iliana continued, "Zoey wrote on the back of their letter, adding her voice to their plea for their money back."

"He wouldn't even give them their original money back?"

"Exactly. From the letter she read, it wasn't the first time they'd asked for their original bet back."

"Wow," Ron said, shaking his head.

She watched Bagman in the mirror. He was looking strained again, quite as strained as he had that night in the forest before the Dark Mark had appeared. But just then Bagman glanced over at the bar, saw Iliana, and stood up.

"In a moment, in a moment!" Iliana heard him say brusquely to the goblins, and Bagman hurried through the pub toward her, his boyish grin back in place.

He paused a moment in front of them, thinking, before saying, a little uncertainly, "Iliana, is it?"

She nodded.

"Good, good. How are you? Been hoping to run into you! Everything going all right?"

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Fine, thanks."

"Wonder if I could have a quick, private word, Iliana?" said Bagman eagerly. "You couldn't give us a moment, you two, could you?"

"Er — okay," said Ron, and he and Hermione went off to find a table.

Bagman led her along the bar to the end furthest from Madam Rosmerta.

"Well, I just thought I'd congratulate you again on your splendid performance against that dragon, Iliana. Quite superb."

"Are you going to give Fred and George their money back?"

"Er, what?" he said, looking completely thrown off balance. "Oh, that. Well, bit of a cash flow issue at the moment, assets tied up in non-liquid form, you see. But I'm working on it, I'm working on it, no need to worry. It'll be taken care of soon enough. By the way, I wanted to talk to you, ask you how you're doing on that egg."

"We have to go under the Black Lake in February." Feeling an insistent feeling from Al, she added, "you're betting on us to win, aren't you?"

"What? I... well... that is-"

"It's okay. I don't think you should be doing that, as you seem to have no knack at all for figuring out the odds, so it's liable to blow up in your face, but since we really want to survive this thing..." she felt around the room with their empathic sense, to feel if anyone was eavesdropping, before continuing, "you wouldn't happen to know some way of keeping warm in cold water in February, would you? Aside from a Warming Charm, I mean. I'd have to reapply it every five minutes, at my skill level."

Bagman scratched his chin, looking thoughtful. "Hmm... that hadn't occurred to me. We weren't expecting someone so young to be entered, after all. I don't have anything for you right now, I'm afraid, but I'll make some discreet inquiries for you, not to worry." He winked at her.

 _ **Good,**_ thought Al. _**Since cheating is a traditional part of the Tournament and all, why not? Thanks for that.**_

 _#_ _ **No problem,**_ _ **#**_ she thought-spoke to him.

Just then, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a familiar face looking at her with concern. It was Lupin.

"Oh crud," she muttered, turning back to Bagman.

"Cool," she said, louder, to Bagman. "Oh, by the way, since I have you here, Mr. Bagman, have you made any progress in finding Bertha Jorkins?"

"No," said Bagman, looking strained again. "I've got people looking, of course …" ( _About time,_ thought Iliana) "and it's all very strange. She definitely _arrived_ in Albania, because she met her second cousin there. And then she left the cousin's house to go south and see an aunt … and she seems to have vanished without trace en route. Blowed if I can see where she's got to … she doesn't seem the type to elope, for instance … but still, I don't know..."

"Were you aware that Vol—er, You-Know-Who was last spotted in Albania. He was a ghostly wraith, but he could possess people and animals, and I had a vision of him over the summer, in which he was solid enough to use a wand."

Bagman turned pale. "Oh now, Iliana, such an imagination on you," he said with false confidence. "He's dead! People under the Imperius or other spells came out of it, and that only happens when someone dies."

"It also happens when someone loses their body but remains earthbound. And I'm not talking about a ghost; we have reason to believe he's going to make a new body for himself. He's probably using Bertha to do precisely that, in fact."

"I..." Bagman nervously steepled his fingers. "Er... well... um... that's, that's useful information, I shall look into it, Iliana. Now if you'll excuse me, I really must be going."

Bagman turned around, and ran right into Fred and George.

"Hello, Mr. Bagman," said Fred brightly. "Can we buy you a drink?"

"Er … no," said Bagman, with a last scared glance at Iliana, "no, thank you, boys …"

Fred and George looked quite as disappointed with Bagman.

"Well, I must dash," he said. "Nice seeing you all. Good luck, Iliana."

He hurried out of the pub. The goblins all slid off their chairs and exited after him.

"It's no good," Iliana told the twins, "he's not good for it. He's betting on me winning the Tournament to cover his gambling debts."

They gawked at her. "You _know_? How do you know?"

Iliana sighed, and quickly told them about how Zoey had intercepted their owl, and what she'd added to the letter.

"I am both offended and impressed that you're guilty of mail tampering, Miss Zoey Potter," Fred said in a faux-stern voice.

"Too bad it didn't at least pan out," said George. "Oh well. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if you win the Tournament."

"Speaking of that, you two wouldn't happen to know some way of keeping warm while under a freezing cold lake in the middle of February, would you?"

"Hmm... whadda ya reckon, George?"

"I dunno, it's nothing like anything we've been using. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything. A potion might work, if you can find a warming potion, since they last a lot longer than charms or other wand-magic."

"Oooh," said Iliana, "that's a good thought. I'll have to look into that."

"Great!" said Fred. "Glad we could help. Now please excuse us, Mistress Potter, but we must needs depart for Zonko's Joke Shop, anon." They bowed to her with a flowery flourish, then left as she chuckled at their antics.

Once they left, Lupin stood up to meet her. She pretended she hadn't seen him, and sat down with Ron and Hermione. From the corner of her eye, she saw Lupin freeze, then change direction to the bathroom.

"What'd he want?" Ron asked her.

She inhaled quickly and began to tell them the whole thing, acutely aware of Hermione's disapproving glare.

"He shouldn't have done that! He's one of the judges! And you, letting him!"

"I want to _survive_ this thing, Hermione! I'm with Al on this; we're at a disadvantage due to our age and skill level, Bagman even admitted they hadn't considered someone as young as me when they came up with the second task. Then there's the fact we didn't choose this. So we need every edge we can get!"

"Yeah, leave her alone, Hermione, she's just trying to survive."

"But you've figured out the egg ages ago!"

"Yes, but we don't know how we're going to stay warm in that cold water. Warming charms only do so much, and it'd be distracting to recast one every few minutes."

Hermione softened. "Why didn't you tell me that was the problem? There's nothing in the rules against Ron and me helping you."

"I..." she paused, thinking. "I hadn't thought of that. I guess I got so caught up in everything I didn't think of that."

"You're forgiven. Anyway, I hope Bagman's helping Cedric as much."

"He's not. It's me he's betting on, remember."

"Uh-oh," said Ron, staring at the door.

Rita Skeeter had just entered. She was wearing banana-yellow robes today; her long nails were painted shocking pink, and she was accompanied by her paunchy photographer. She looked like a slutty banana. She bought drinks, and she and the photographer made their way through the crowds to a table nearby, Iliana, Ron, and Hermione glaring at her as she approached. She was talking fast and looking very satisfied about something.

"… didn't seem very keen to talk to us, did he, Bozo? Now, why would that be, do you think? And what's he doing with a pack of goblins in tow anyway? Showing them the sights … what nonsense … he was always a bad liar. Reckon something's up? Think we should do a bit of digging? 'Disgraced Ex-Head of Magical Games and Sports, Ludo Bagman …' Snappy start to a sentence, Bozo — we just need to find a story to fit it —"

"Ah, Rita, showing all the journalistic integrity of the Daily Mail, I see," Iliana quipped loudly.

A few people looked around. Rita Skeeter's eyes widened behind her jeweled spectacles as she saw who had spoken.

"The Daily what now?"

"The Daily Mail, it's a Muggle 'newspaper,' and I use the term very lightly. It's usually called a tabloid, but I don't know if wizards know that word or not. The 'reporters' for the Daily Mail make up fake stories all the time, and twist real stories around to be mostly lies. It's widely considered to be a rag not worth wiping your arse on. I've read it before, Rita, and you'd fit right in there."

Rita's face was turning red. If looks could kill, Rita's expression would at least be giving Iliana a moderate flu.

"What are you implying, Missy?"

"I'm not implying anything. I'm outright saying that your brand of journalism is to make up things and then pick and choose what 'facts' fit your lies. And if The Daily Prophet – a name coincidentally similar to The Daily Mail – is willing to publish rubbish like that, then it's a rubbish paper. I'm saying you're a rubbish reporter who wouldn't know journalistic integrity or truth if it came up and tapdanced on your face. All you care about is what sells, no matter how much bologna is in it. You'll even ruin lives to get people reading your sordid garbage. First Hagrid, now Bagman, is it?"

Rita Skeeter raised her heavily penciled eyebrows.

"Our readers have a right to the truth, Potter. I am merely doing my —"

"Who cares if he's half-giant?" Iliana shouted. "There's nothing wrong with him! He's a dear, sweet man! He's a 12 foot tall teddy bear!"

The whole pub had gone very quiet. Madam Rosmerta was staring over from behind the bar, apparently oblivious to the fact that the flagon she was filling with mead was overflowing.

Rita Skeeter's smile flickered very slightly, but she hitched it back almost at once; she snapped open her crocodile-skin handbag, pulled out her Quick-Quotes Quill, and said, "How about giving me an interview about the Hagrid _you_ know, Harry? The man behind the muscles? Your unlikely friendship and the reasons behind it. Would you call him a father substitute?"

"My name is Iliana. There is nobody in our collective named Harry, and hasn't been since this summer."

Hermione stood up very abruptly, her butterbeer clutched in her hand as though it were a grenade.

"You horrible woman," she said, through gritted teeth, "you don't care, do you, anything for a story, and anyone will do, won't they? Even Ludo Bagman —"

"Sit down, you silly little girl, and don't talk about things you don't understand," said Rita Skeeter coldly, her eyes hardening as they fell on Hermione. "I know things about Ludo Bagman that would make your hair curl … _not_ that it needs it —" she added, eyeing Hermione's bushy hair.

Iliana glared at Rita with such malice that it became palpable. Rita's face actually fell into fear when she saw it. Then Iliana's left hand shot up, pointed at Rita Skeeter, and the woman fell into the air and became glued to the ceiling. She seemed stuck there by powerful gravity, being squeezed into place, hardly able to breathe.

"Do not worry, Insignificant Maggot," Chandra said with Iliana's voice, "this spell I have been practicing. It will wear off in twenty minutes. Have fun."

Turning to Hermione, Iliana said, "Let's go, shall we?"

They nodded, and left with her.

"Well," Ron said in a worried voice as they walked back up the street, "now Rita Skeeter will be after both of you. You may as well have declared war on her."

"If it's war she wants, it's war she'll get," Hermione said hotly.

"Amen to that," agreed Iliana. "Mess with me, fine; I can handle it. Mess with my friends, and she'd better watch out, or being stuck to a ceiling will be the least of her worries."

"You don't want to go upsetting Rita Skeeter," said Ron nervously. "I'm serious, Hermione, Iliana, she'll dig up something on you —"

"My parents don't read the _Daily Prophet._ She can't scare me into hiding!" said Hermione, now striding along so fast that it was all Iliana and Ron could do to keep up with her.

"Yeah well Iliana doesn't even _have_ parents, and look how much Skeeter's affected _her_ life."

Ignoring Ron, Hermione broke into a run, leading them all the way back up the road, through the gates flanked by winged boars, and up through the grounds to Hagrid's cabin.

"He's still got his curtains drawn," Iliana noted.

"Hagrid!" Hermione shouted, pounding on his front door. "Hagrid, that's enough! We know you're in there! Nobody cares if your mum was a giantess, Hagrid! You can't let that foul Skeeter woman do this to you! Hagrid, get out here, you're just being —"

The door opened. Hermione said, "About t — !" and then stopped, very suddenly, because she had found herself face-to-face, not with Hagrid, but with Albus Dumbledore.

"Good afternoon," he said pleasantly, smiling down at them.

"We — er — we wanted to see Hagrid," said Hermione in a rather small voice.

"Yes, I surmised as much," said Dumbledore, his eyes twinkling. "Why don't you come in?"

"Oh … um … okay," said Hermione.

They went into Hagrid's hut. Fang launched himself at Iliana the moment they did, and she jumped right into the air in startled fright, finding herself laying down in a corner of the ceiling as though gravity had reversed. She carefully crawled back down to the ground and set her personal gravity back to normal, then looked around.

Hagrid was sitting at his table, where there were two large mugs of tea. He looked a real mess. His face was blotchy, his eyes swollen, and he had gone to the other extreme where his hair was concerned; far from trying to make it behave, it now looked like a wig of tangled wire.

"Hi, Hagrid," Iliana said, hugging him. His mouth twitched at this, but he couldn't quite manage a smile.

" 'Lo," he said in a very hoarse voice.

Dumbledore got them some more tea with a twiddle of his wand before speaking.

"Did you by any chance hear what Miss Granger was shouting, Hagrid?"

Hermione went slightly pink, but Dumbledore smiled at her and continued, "Hermione, Iliana, and Ron still seem to want to know you, judging by the way they were attempting to break down the door."

"Of course we still want to know you!" Iliana said, staring at Hagrid. " _All_ of us do! You don't think anything that Skeeter cow — sorry, Professor," she added quickly, looking at Dumbledore.

But Dumbledore had fallen conveniently deaf, allowing her to go on.

"I just meant — Hagrid, how could you think we'd care what that — woman — wrote about you? We know you, we care about you, we love you, you big silly! Nothing she could say would change that."

Two fat tears leaked out of Hagrid's beetle-black eyes and fell slowly into his tangled beard.

"Living proof of what I've been telling you, Hagrid," said Dumbledore. "I have shown you the letters from the countless parents who remember you from their own days here, telling me in no uncertain terms that if I sacked you, they would have something to say about it —"

"Not all of 'em," said Hagrid hoarsely. "Not all of 'em wan' me ter stay."

"Really, Hagrid, if you are holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time," said Dumbledore, now peering sternly over his half-moon spectacles. "Not a week has passed since I became headmaster of this school when I haven't had at least one owl complaining about the way I run it. But what should I do? Barricade myself in my study and refuse to talk to anybody?"

"Yeh — yeh're not half-giant!" said Hagrid croakily.

"Hagrid, look what my aunt and uncle are like! Look at the Dursleys! Worst anti-wizard racists in the country, I lived with them for a whole decade! And I turned out alright. I turned out weird, but alright. Heck, you could be the secret lovechild of a giantess and Voldemort himself and I wouldn't care!"

Hagrid jerked in surprise at the name so violently that he broke one of the legs of his chair. He stood up, and Dumbledore repaired it with his wand.

"D-don't say that name!"

"Iliana has an excellent point," said Professor Dumbledore. "My own brother, Aberforth, was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms on a goat. It was all over the papers, but did Aberforth hide? No, he did not! He held his head high and went about his business as usual! Of course, I'm not entirely sure he can read, so that may not have been bravery."

Iliana gave Dumbledore a sidelong look, as though about to ask a question, then seemed to think better of it.

"Come back and teach, Hagrid," said Hermione quietly, "please come back, we really miss you."

"Chandra just pinned Rita Skeeter to the ceiling with a Reverse Gravity Charm of his own design, Hagrid, in your defense. Well, and Hermione's defense, too," Iliana said. "But we did it because she's the reason you're in here sulking, and we want you back."

Hagrid gulped. More tears leaked out down his cheeks and into his tangled beard.

Dumbledore stood up. "I refuse to accept your resignation, Hagrid, and I expect you back at work on Monday," he said. "You will join me for breakfast at eight-thirty in the Great Hall. No excuses. Good afternoon to you all."

Dumbledore left, pausing to scratch Fang, and the three of them spent the next hour or two comforting Hagrid, getting him back to something close to his old self again. It seemed to work, as he showed them a picture of his long-dead dad, who looked tiny compared to an 11 year old Hagrid, who was already about 7 or 8 feet tall by then. He then went on to explain how Dumbledore stuck up for him after his dad died, back in his second year. How Dumbledore got him his job and his hut. And then he went on in annoyance about Madame Maxime, not that he acted like he knew they knew who he was talking about.

Finally, Hagrid asked, "How you doin' with yer egg, Iliana?"

"Well, Zoey accidentally figured out out at a party when a bunch of punch spilled into it. So we know we have to go into the Black Lake this February. We know how to breathe and we learned how to swim over the summer, but we don't know how we're going to keep warm down there. Hagrid, do you know any ways to keep warm under water in winter?"

Hagrid frowned. "Yeh know I can' tell yeh that, I'm a teacher! 'Gainst the rules, innit?"

"But we're not trying to _win,_ Hagrid, we just want to survive. If we go into that water without some way of keeping warm, we'll either die or have to give up, which could end with the Cup killing us anyway. And Tier's shape-shifting is inadequate to the task."

Hagrid looked at her sadly. "When yeh put it that way, I would. But I dunno. I never go in there. No need; the merpeople take care of it pretty well themselves."

"Damn. Oh well. We'll think of something."

 _ **In fact,**_ thought Al, _**I did tell Cedric about the dragons. Maybe he'd be willing to return the favor.**_

 _ **#It's worth a try,#**_ Iliana thought back.

Endnotes: If someone were to draw a picture of Hagrid dressed as a Shriner and riding a comically tiny motorcycle, and send it to me, I think I might have a Luna-style laugh attack or three. :D Also, if "Meep, meep! Vroom, vroom! Putt-putt-putt!" becomes a meme, that would make my year. :D (A girl can dream.)

If you've ever seen Steven Universe, and the scene where Yellow Diamond pulls this horrible face at being called "clod" by Peridot, that's the kind of face I was imagining Al making at Malfoy in this chapter.

You can thank White Squirrel's "The Arithmancer" and its sequel, "Lady Archimedes," for the idea of the spell-layer peeling arithmancy that Chandra did in this chapter.

Also, the free-divers of Malaysia are real. They're called the Bajau people. Makes sense that in the Potterverse, there would be wizards among them.

The Lupin stuff in The Three Broomsticks was a set-up for a bad Latin joke that I decided not to go with. I was going to have Lupin corner them on a balcony in the castle and for Al to think "A fronte praecipitum, a tego Lupin." It's hilarious if you know what the meaning of the Latin phrase it's a pun of, but it'd just go over most people's heads.


	33. The Second Task

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 33"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-three: The Second Task**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__ _and %_ _ _Mother%__ _if I get around to it in this chapter._

 _ **Note 4:**_ __ _She's creepy and she's kooky, mysterious and ooky, she's altogether spooky, she's J. K. Rowling._

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

After dinner that evening, Iliana switched to Al early, and Al went off in search of Cedric. He soon found the Hufflepuff boy in the corridor and walked along beside him.

"Yes, Al? Did you want something?"

"Can we talk privately?"

"Er... well, I suppose so. Here, there's a good empty classroom this way."

Al followed Cedric into the spare classroom dusty from disuse – except for a few obvious places where two or more people had disturbed the dust with their bodies, no doubt snogging or something like it.

"So what did you want to discuss?"

"I figured out my egg. Have you?"

"Yes."

"So you know we have to go into the Black Lake."

"Yes."

"Well for us, breathing won't be an issue. But Tier isn't having any luck with the kind of anatomy needed to keep warm in cold water, and our warming charm isn't very good. We'd be recasting it every few minutes. Now I'm just trying to survive this thing, which won't happen if I freeze to death of hypothermia in this stupid Task, and I warned you about the dragons. I only did it to be fair, not expecting to cash it in later, but, well, it's getting very close to the Second Task, and we still haven't figured out how to solve the warmth issue. So I'm looking for a little _quid pro quo_."

Al could feel, before Cedric even said anything, that the older boy couldn't help, even though he wanted to. "If your warming charms aren't up to it, I don't know what to tell you. Except... well, you could cast _Impervius_ on yourself."

"Already thought of that. It wouldn't work. The water wouldn't soak into me, but it would still be pressing against me, sucking the heat out of my body."

"Well... there's nothing in the rules for this Task that says you can't bring other stuff with you. If you could find some artifact or potion to stay warm underwater, that would be allowed."

"Yeah, someone else mentioned that. I haven't found anything yet, though."

"Hey, I know how to use the library pretty well at this point. There are tricks to it, you see. Come, let's go now, maybe I can find you something."

Al shrugged. "Okay," he said, following Cedric out the door.

When they got to the library, Cedric went to the end of one of the bookshelves, and touched his wand to it.

"Show me underwater magic," he said.

A bookshelf across the room lit up, and they followed it.

"How come nobody's ever shown us this before?"

"No idea. Anyway, here we are."

The bookshelf in question went out when Cedric touched it, but several shelves of books slid forward, making themselves stand out from the crowd.

Holding his wand to the shelf again, Cedric said, "Show me means of self-warming that work underwater."

All but 10 of the books slid back into place.

"That a fourth year student could learn in a month or less."

Whittled down to 4 books, now. Cedric removed his wand and the two of them looked at the books that were there. Two of the books were phantom books, which Cedric explained meant that they were currently checked out. Al recognized one of those as one he had checked out.

"Damn, this would've been so helpful first and second year. We could've solved both mysteries in like, five minutes with this. Ruddy substandard education!"

Taking the other book off the shelf, Cedric set it down on a table, touched his wand to a part of the book that wouldn't move if the book opened, and repeated his request. The book flew open, pages moving as though in a fast breeze, and landed on a section labeled 'Ye Viking's Arctic Vigour Potion, for keeping warme in cold climes, e'en in frigid water.'

"Well this potion looks easy enough to me. What about you, Al?"

"Yes. Let's see... sunflower petals, ashwinder eggs, salamander blood, a cube of ice for each of those ingredients, with a base of dandelion root, marshmallow root, honey, and water."

Al put a bookmark in the book and took it over to check out.

"Thanks for your help, Cedric. Did you want to use this potion too? I could copy it down for you."

"That's fine. I've been practicing my Warming Charm in the tub, I'll only need to cast it once or twice."

"Okay. If you change your mind, let me know."

Cedric waved goodbye, leaving Al to start the process of making the potion. He only had one place to go for that, though, and he didn't like it. But he decided to risk it. After all, though the man didn't like them, he did try to keep them alive in first year. They shifted back to Iliana first, for an added edge.

A few minutes later, Professor Snape heard a knock at his office door. Annoyed but curious who was bothering him this late on a Saturday, when he'd been trying to grade papers, he went to the door and opened it, nearly having a heart attack from the shock of the girl before him. Once he recovered, he got very angry at her nerve. To look like that in the first place, then to hit him with it unexpectedly.

"What do you want, Potter?"

Iliana cowered a little, thinking maybe this was a bad idea, but pressed on anyway.

"I, er... well, about the Second Task, I-"

"I am not helping you cheat, girl. Begone!"

"That's not what I'm asking for! I just need somewhere to brew a potion."

His eyes narrowed suspiciously. "What kind of potion?"

"It's called Ye Viking's Arctic Vigour Potion. It's to keep me warm under the Black Lake during the Second Task."

Professor Snape was impressed despite himself that the Potters had thought of a potion for that task.

"It is pronounced _The_ Viking's Arctic Vigour Potion," he corrected automatically. "Back in those days, the TH sound was made with a rune called 'thorn,' but since printing presses did not have the letter thorn, the Y was used because of their similarity in shape. Let me see that book."

Reluctantly, she handed it over. He read the page in question.

"Yes, this potion is simple enough even a first-year could manage it, I think. But it has a very short shelf-life, only three days before it becomes useless sludge. I commend your willingness to be prepared, Potter, but you would have to wait until, preferably, the day before the Task to brew this. And frankly, I do not wish to see you waste valuable potions ingredients practicing this potion beforehand. However..." he looked thoughtful for a moment before continuing, "I see no reason you shouldn't try the day before the Task. Come to my office after dinner on the 23rd of February and I will supervise your attempt."

"You will? Sir?"

"Yes. In fact, this recipe is severely out of date, and the side effects of this version would be painful indeed. I can think of half a dozen ways to improve on it just off the top of my head, minimizing the side effects and increasing the stability of the potion. When you come in on February 23rd, I will provide you with an improved version of the potion for you to brew."

"I... er, doesn't that violate the rules of the Tournament, sir?"

He considered her in that slow and deliberate manner of his.

"No, I don't think it does. _You_ came to _me_ with this potion. It is unsafe as written here, so it is my duty to my students to see to their safety. Besides which, remember which House I am in, Potter."

"'Those cunning Slytherins will use any means to achieve their ends,'" she quoted.

"Quite," he agreed. "Now, I will need this book so I can write down its version of the potion before I improve it. I will hand it back to you after our next class, Miss Potter."

"Thank you, sir."

"You are welcome. You are now also dismissed," he said, closing the door before she could respond.

With the dilemma of keeping warm underwater in February solved, as long as Snape didn't change his mind before then, the next several weeks went by pretty smoothly. They focused on schoolwork and on designing a tasteful bathing suit for the Second Task, or bathing suits plural, really, since they couldn't be sure something wouldn't go wrong and end up having to do the Task as Zoey or something or someone even more peculiar, like that time two of them had tried to come Out at the same time and instead became a weird deformed mix of the two of them.

They also practiced as many of the underwater defensive spells as they could, from the books Moody had suggested. Further, now that they knew Cedric's trick to finding books faster in the library, they could find useful books a lot faster, and being so prepared was having a calming effect on them.

What was more, their sleep had improved. Before finding the warming potion, half their nights had given them less than adequate sleep, but now with that problem solved, they only had one night like that a week.

Dumbledore's occlumency lessons went better, too. Before, they'd had more intrusions, seeing flashes of scenes from their past, and even one odd vision of Sirius's library, but dark like it was night, which was confusing until visions of Aunt Marge's dog chasing them up a tree drove it out of their mind.

But at last, the weeks went by and it was the 23rd of February. Deciding to go as Iliana again because he seemed to treat her better than the others, they went to his office that night and knocked on the door.

Expecting them, and emotionally prepared for anything, Professor Snape was actually somewhat relieved it was Iliana. Adira would have been acceptable, too. He was just glad it hadn't been the one that looked like Black, or the hyperactive child. Teaching 11 year olds was difficult enough without having to tolerate six year olds, too.

"Come in, Miss Potter," he said curtly.

She did, and he closed the door with his wand.

"The improved version of the Arctic Vigour Potion is on this piece of parchment. Do you have the book with the original version, to compare and contrast the two versions?"

"Er, no. I didn't know that was necessary."

"Yes, I knew you did not. In fact, you returned the book, which is why I checked it out again. Here it is. The potion is on page 324. Compare and contrast the two versions, since you might as well learn something while you are here. When you have done that, close the book and use the updated version of the potion on the parchment. And after the Second Task is done, I will expect 15 inches of parchment or more on an essay about the improvements to the potion. It will be extra credit."

Iliana blinked. Extra credit? Snape never gave extra credit.

As though reading her mind, Snape said, "Your performance in my class is moderately better than the performance of other students in your year. And I have been observing you and your... companions... long enough to realize that you, Miss Iliana Potter, are better at Potions than the other... companions. I may be strict, and I may be less than social, but I do like to encourage talent. I do not know how it is you have more talent than your companions, but perhaps if I encourage you, I will learn the answer to that."

She blinked again. This was the second time she could think of that Snape had complimented her, in his own peculiar way. And here, in the absence of other witnesses, it seemed he felt relaxed enough to be kinder and gentler, in the same way that a tornado is kinder and gentler than a category 5 hurricane.

"Er... yes sir. Thank you, sir."

"Your ingredients are lined up here on this shelf," he said, pointing at a mostly-empty shelf with the ingredients for the warming potion laid out.

"Now get to work. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. I doubt you will, as the complexity of the modified potion is still within your skill level, but I would rather be annoyed by a question than have to put out a fire."

"Understood, sir."

He sat down, as did she, they both got to work.

Looking over the two versions, there were indeed several differences between the old version and the new version of the potion, written down in Snape's distinctive scrawl. He had added lavender, peppermint, and concentrated lemon juice to the potion, as well as a milligram of powdered hematite. Some of the instructions for stirring, the order of ingredients, or the times to let the mixture simmer – among other things – had been altered as well. The hematite, for one, had to be dissolved in a drop of diluted bundimun secretion before being added to the potion. Snape had provided a small container enspelled to hold the hematite and bundimun solution in suspension so none of it would be wasted by sticking to a surface.

She was about to put the book away and start on the new version of the potion when she thought of something.

"Sir?"

"What is it, Miss Potter?"

"Why peppermint? Isn't it a pain reliever?"

Snape set his quill down and turned to look at her properly.

"Yes, it is. What are its other properties?"

"Um... an antiseptic."

"Yes."

"And... doesn't it help with intestinal gas, too?"

"Yes, peppermint has an effect on gas, from a purely Muggle herbal standpoint. But it has magical properties as well, which tend to be similar in nature to its Muggle properties. How might it interact with the other ingredients in the potion?"

"Well... the salamander blood is a powerful elemental agent, and magical catalyst."

"Indeed it is."

"So... interacting with peppermint... it might have magical effects on other gases, too."

"What would be the benefit of such a thing, Miss Potter?"

"Um... well I don't know if it applies to someone using gills to breathe, and I don't know if the lake is deep enough to need it, but if you gave this to someone diving deep in the ocean, I suppose it could have a magical effect on the nitrogen in the blood, preventing nitrogen narcosis, AKA the bends."

"Exactly my thought as well. You see, I had more than tomorrow's adventure in mind when I improved this potion. It is quite an interesting potion, by the way, and I'm contemplating adding it to my curriculum."

"Sounds like a good addition to me, sir."

"Thank you for your input, Miss Potter. Now, please do brew the spell before curfew. I do not wish to have to write you a note for Mr. Filch, if I do not have to."

"Just one more thing, sir, if it's okay?"

"What is it, Miss Potter?"

"Well you mentioned its short shelf-life, so I was wondering if the addition of peppermint, honey, and lemon juice might be intended to increase its shelf-life, sir? Because the first two are antiseptic, and lemon juice is a natural food preservative."

"Excellent deduction, Miss Potter," he said with a small grin. "Five points to Griffindor. Now please do get back to work."

She blinked again, stunned at the points given rather than taken, but then nodded and got to work on the potion.

When she got back to the Griffindor common room with several vials of the warming potion, which looked like liquid fire but more yellow than red, she found Ron waiting for her.

"Oy, where were you?"

"Getting something I need for tomorrow," she said.

"Ah, okay."

"Where's Hermione?"

"Dunno. Fred came down here earlier to tell her McGongall wanted to see her for something."

"Ah, I think I know what that's about. She must be my hostage."

"Hostage? Whadda ya mean, 'hostage'?"

"Oh yeah, Moody told me the thing the merpeople are going to take, that we Champions have to get back, is hostages. But Dumbledore is personally ensuring their safety."

"Really? Well okay, if Dumbledore says they're alright, then I won't worry."

"Me neither. Anyway, I'm tired. Snape didn't want me to just make his improved version of the warming potion, he had me comparing the two. And he says that after the Second Task, I have to write an extra-credit essay for him about the improvements."

"Oy, he gave you extra work? And he's actually going to give you extra credit for it? Someone's used Polyjuice Potion to replace Snape!"

She laughed. "I doubt that. He's still difficult to tolerate, snappish, and grumpy. Just less so, when it's just him and me. Don't tell anyone I said that, he'll probably go mental if he finds out."

Iliana yawned. "Anyway, like I said, bedtime. I have to put these potions vials in that little bag of mine, so I know where they are."

Ron yawned too. "Sleep sounds good to me, too. See you in the morning!"

"Assuming I haven't become someone else, of course."

Ron laughed.

In the morning, they woke up as Adira, which – as complications went – was pretty mild. She and Iliana were about the same size, after all, and they'd planned for this possibility, so as she got dressed, she put her one-piece bathing suit on underneath her robes, and strapped the little vials of potion to her arms in case of emergency. With that done, she tried calling Sirius on the two-way mirror, but he didn't pick up. Since it was 7 in the morning, she assumed he was still sleeping, or else was too busy on his motorbike to answer, since the Second Task was at 9:30 that morning.

After breakfast, she walked down to the Black Lake with some of the other people, to check out the place. There were stands for the audience, the lowest of these about 10 feet off the ground, to get a good look at the water where the images of the Champions would be projected.

Over her shoulder, so to speak, Iliana was looking for Luna. The longer it took her Ravenclaw friend to show up, the more worried she became. At last, though, Luna showed up, holding aloft a sign saying "Potter for the win!" with an animated drawing of several people from their collective diving into the lake and coming out triumphantly with boxes of treasure.

She ran into Lupin on his way into the stands.

"Remus! Er, I mean Professor Lupin, sir!"

Lupin turned to Adira. "Yes, Adira?"

"Have you seen Sirius?"

"Hmm..." he said, looking around. "Come to think of it, I haven't. Which is odd; he told me he would be here. 'Right in the thick of things,' he said."

"When did he say that?"

"Just last night. He came over to Hogsmeade to stay in the inn for the night, and sent me an owl to meet him there, which I did. I haven't seen him since. Silly Padfoot, though, he's probably overslept."

"Oh. Well is there any way you can wake him up before it's too late? I don't want him to miss this."

"I wouldn't worry, pup. Padfoot won't be late. Go on, it looks like Bagman is gathering the Champions."

She nodded and walked over to Bagman. Adira took her shoes and robes off, and set them on a nearby bench provided for that purpose. The other Champions disrobed as well. They all stood there in the chilly February air in their swimsuits. Adira shivered. Her primary dose of warming potion lasted two hours, and she had several emergency doses. She was cold enough already that she took a small sip of one of the smaller potions.

The effect was immediate, feeling like drinking hot cocoa after playing in the snow all day, but it moved through her torso and into her arms and legs. It was pleasant at first, but then it kept going, until she was sweating.

 _Of course_ , she thought in annoyance, _it's designed to be used in cold water. Of_ _ **course**_ _I'm overheating in the air._

"Oh good, you're here. Did you all, er, work out what you're doing today?"

The four of them nodded, but Fleur looked distracted. She kept looking all around for something or someone, especially up in the stands, which she could barely see from this angle.

"So you all worked out, then, that you must go into the Black Lake to fetch what has been taken from you?"

They nodded again.

"Good. But let us review the song anyway. Here is a translation:

 _"Come seek us where our voices sound,_

 _We cannot sing above the ground,_

 _And while you're searching ponder this:  
We've taken what you'll sorely miss,_

 _"Two hours long you'll have to look,  
And to recover what we took,_

 _"Around obstacles, past creature guards,  
Whirlpools and magic wards,_

 _"But past two hours — the prospect's black,  
Too late, it's gone, it won't come back."_

They all nodded again. Adira had to wipe sweat from her head and neck with her robes.

"Excellent, so you have two hours. If you go over two hours, you get penalized on points. There are obstacles down there, which were not easy to set up, I'll tell you that. Be on alert. Nothing down there should kill you, but it's still risky. Especially depending on what you plan to do to breathe down there."

"We understand, Mr. Bagman," Krum said.

"Good. Well you have a few more minutes til we begin, and I need to commentate. Oh I almost forgot, I have to cast a spell on you so the spectators can see what you're doing down there."

He pointed his wand at them, and on each of them he cast _"_ _Video per aquam."_

"There, now I really must be going."

"Meester Bagman, please; where is Gabrielle? She was to be here, but I 'ave not seen her."

"Oh that reminds me, the thing you're each to retrieve: the merpeople are holding one human hostage per each of you, you must rescue your hostages within two-"

"'OSTAGES? Gabrielle! Gabrielle!"

"Woah, Fleur," Adira said, grabbing her by the shoulders. "Calm down. They're in no danger. Dumbledore is personally assuring their safety."

"Dumbledore eez keeping them safe? Eez this true, Meester Bagman?"

"Yes, it is, Miss Delacour. Now really, I do need to be going."

"I'll calm her down, Mr. Bagman. You go."

Fleur was breathing hard, and while Fleur was calmer than she'd been a moment ago, Adira could feel she was on the edge of a panic attack. Bagman was already gone, and so Adira did as she promised and tried to help Fleur calm down, while fighting the heat of the potion.

"It's just a game, Fleur. Gabrielle will be fine. She's safe. Remember that. Now take a deep breath in, hold it, then let it go. Again, breathe in, hold it, let go."

Fleur did as instructed, and it was working. Finally, Fleur sighed and nodded. "I will remember that. Thank you... er..."

"Adira Potter."

"Thank you very much, Adira," she said.

Fleur calmed down just in time for Bagman's magically magnified voice to ring out over the cheering crowd and down to the Champions.

"Well, all our champions are ready for the second task, which will start on my whistle. They have precisely two hours to recover what has been taken from them. On the count of three, then. One … two … _three_!"

The whistle echoed shrilly in the cold, still air; the stands erupted with cheers and applause. Adira waded into the water up to her waist, checking her wand in the holster attached to the hip of her swimsuit. The small sip of potion she'd swallowed was already starting to wear off. But before she took the main dose, she paused, concentrating, calling on Tier. In a few short moments, she felt him shake their head and transform their body. Her lungs collapsed, sealing up. From her neck sprouted gills. And then she collapsed into the water, for he had turned her legs into a dolphin-like fluke, while a dorsal fin sprouted from her back and her arms changed into partial fins, leaving her hands human so she could use her wand.

She couldn't breathe in the air now, so she leaped into the water, taking in a great mouthful of water, which felt like the breath of life. She swam around a little bit to get the feel of the modifications. It was only then that she noticed he'd pulled her glasses Inside, and given her underwater vision, complete with a nictitating membrane like a second, transparent eyelid so she could see where she was going without getting silt in her eyes.

But of course, with that sip of potion wearing off, the water was getting cold. So she surfaced long enough to take the primary dose of the potion, Vanishing the bottle when it was empty. Again the warmth spread through her whole body, but this time she felt neither too cold nor too warm. With that out of the way, she dived down into the water's depths.

Silence pressed upon her ears as she soared over a strange, dark, foggy landscape. She could only see ten feet around her, even with the improved eyesight, so that as she sped through the water new scenes seemed to loom suddenly out of the oncoming darkness: forests of rippling, tangled black weed, wide plains of mud littered with dull, glimmering stones. She swam deeper and deeper, out toward the middle of the lake, her eyes wide, staring through the eerily gray-lit water around her to the shadows beyond, where the water became opaque.

Small fish flickered past her like silver darts. Once or twice she thought she saw something larger moving ahead of her, but when she got nearer, she discovered it to be nothing but a large, blackened log, or a dense clump of weed. There was no sign of any of the other champions, merpeople, Hermione — nor, thankfully, the giant squid.

Adira swam above some green weeds, remembering the song, wary. Despite this, she was taken by surprise when something grabbed one side of her fluke. She jerked in surprise, turning to see what it was, and spotted grindylows. They were trying to drag her down, but couldn't find much purchase, since she'd left her robes behind, and the swimsuit was closer to her arms than her fluke was.

She shouted, casting one of the spells she'd learned for underwater defense. All that came out of her mouth was an air bubble, but a moray eel came out of her wand and bit the grindylow that had her ankle. She cast the spell a couple more times, more eels attacking the grindylows until they vanished back into the weeds. Their task complete, the eels vanished into nothing.

Adira slowed down to look around, take stock of her surroundings. She was deep under the lake now, though how deep she didn't know.

"Harry?"

Panic gripped Adira's heart like a heart attack as she whipped around, pointing her wand at the sudden voice.

Moaning Myrtle floating hazily in front of her, gazing at her curiously through her thick, pearly glasses.

"Myrtle?" she tried to shout, but again just made an air bubble. Moaning Myrtle actually giggled.

"You look different, Harry. I haven't seen you in my bathroom for ages. Wait a moment... are you a girl, now?"

Adira nodded. She mouthed 'Tell you about it later. Can't really talk here.'

"Oh yes, I understand. I do hope you do, it's been lonely lately. Everyone avoids my bathroom."

'Sorry about that,' Adira mouthed.

"Anyway, Harry... or, I suppose you have a different name, being that you're a girl now. Well whatever. You'll want to go that way, it's where the merpeople village is. But they don't like me, so I can't go with you. Also, it's protected by things, now. Must be part of this Triwizard Tournament. I must say, I never thought I'd live to see it played again. In a manner of speaking, I mean."

'Thank you, Myrtle,' she mouthed, giving her a thumbs-up too, just in case.

"Good luck!" Myrtle said back, before leaving.

Adira swam for what felt like at least 20 minutes, over vast swaths of mostly barren mud, til finally she heard a bit of haunting mersong.

 _"Two hours long you'll have to look,_

 _And to recover what we took."_

Adira swam faster and soon saw a large rock emerge out of the muddy water ahead. It had paintings of merpeople on it; they were carrying spears and chasing what looked like the giant squid. She swam past the rock, only to jerk back and grab it, trying not to get sucked in by a whirlpool that had come out of nowhere.

Her fingers clutched at the slippery stone, trying to pull away from the whirlpool, but it wasn't working very well. Then she remembered her body's current configuration, and beat the water with her powerful flukes as hard as she could, breaking free of the swirling waters back into the calm abyss.

There were other stones in the area, she found as she swam around looking for another way into the village. One stone that looked promising she approached with caution, and good thing too, because rushing out from behind the stone was... a horse.

Or rather, it looked like a horse, but its mane was made of bullrushes, so Adira knew it had to be a kelpie.

The kelpie wasn't making any threatening moves. In fact, it was getting down on its haunches, lowering itself in invitation to ride. But she'd read about kelpies, they couldn't be trusted. Ride one, and it would eat you. And since she didn't know the Placement Charm, there was no way to render it docile. Since she also didn't know if it would attack her if she tried to get past it, she swam away instead. Luckily, it did not follow her.

Adira didn't have much luck at the other stones she found, either. One set of stones would push her away with a strong outward current if she tried to go through them or over them. Another set looked okay, but something felt wrong to her. She didn't know how to test it, so she kept going. She was barely gone when she felt panic from someone else back where she'd been. She swam back to see what was wrong.

Cedric was trapped in some invisible spell that had been woven between the two stones. He had a bubble on his head, distorting his appearance, but she was certain it was him. She thought a moment about what to do. He didn't appear to be in any danger; it would just be inconvenient for him, and he would likely not free his hostage. Still, she wasn't sure.

The question, however, was soon answered, for Cedric relaxed, apparently giving up, and the spell let him go. Moving quickly, Adira swam away as fast as her fluke would take her.

After a few more attempts with stones that had traps built into them, she found one that looked like a large door, with three concentric rings on it, like a dart board, but with lines through the rings like an eight-armed star. Inside the sections created in the rings by these lines were diamonds. On the ground before the door were 24 diamond-shaped stones with numbers on them, the same amount of stones as spaces in the rings. She considered that a moment, then swam up to try to go over the stone. It looked clear, but there was a solid, invisible barrier in the way. She swamp up even more. The barrier just kept going, possibly all the way to the surface, so she went back down to consider the puzzle.

On each diamond-shaped stone was a number. She examined the door more closely, and saw that there was writing beneath the rings, which said in English, 'Write, Champion, and enter.' She wondered if Dumbledore had come up with this one, as it sounded like the riddle in The Lord of the Rings, to enter Moria. But there weren't any letters, just numbers.

Someone swam next to her. Adira turned and saw Cedric. Cedric examined the puzzle, too, and she began to ignore his presence.

 _Okay guys, I need your help,_ she thought at the others.

 _ **Maybe it's an alphanumeric code?**_ Suggested Al.

She picked up some of the pieces and looked at them, then back at the puzzle.

 _~Write, Champion, and enter.~_ Chandra thought. He found the appropriate numbers to spell out Champion: 3, 8, 1, 13, 16, 9, 15, and 14.

 _But how?_ Adira thought. _There's 24 tiles and 24 spaces, and the spaces are in three rings. 'Champion' is only eight letters._

 _ **Maybe we spell the letters out in the innermost ring?**_

She tried that, putting the tiles for that sequence of numbers in the available spaces, starting with the '3' at the top of the innermost ring. Nothing happened.

Cedric, however, seemed to have figured out what she was thinking, and picked up the other tiles to look at them, and tried finding tiles to add up to the different numbers. This was impeded by the limited number of tiles and by the different size of the tiles in the different rings, which limited the outer ring to digits zero through seven, the middle ring to digits 1, 2, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, and 12, and of course the innermost ring they were pretty sure they knew already.

After trying a few combos, it became plain there was only one solution, and before long they had it worked out. One plus two made three, three plus five made eight, zero plus one was one, two and eleven made thirteen, and so on. When they got the last piece in place, adding six and eight to make fourteen, the door slid back and rolled to the left side behind one of the boulders.

The two of them swam in through what was now the only entrance, unless you wanted to brave a kelpie or swim against a current, and the door rolled and slid back into place behind them, probably dropping all its tiles, too. Krum and Fleur would just have to do the puzzle themselves.

A cluster of crude stone dwellings stained with algae loomed suddenly out of the gloom on all sides. Here and there at the dark windows, Adira saw faces. Strange faces.

The merpeople had grayish skin and long, wild, dark green hair. Their eyes were yellow, as were their broken teeth, and they wore thick ropes of pebbles around their necks. They leered at Adira and Cedric as they swam past; one or two of them emerged from their caves to watch them better, their powerful, silver fish tails beating the water, spears clutched in their hands.

She swam on, the houses getting more numerous; there were gardens of weed around some of them, and she even saw a pet grindylow tied to a stake outside one door. Merpeople were emerging on all sides now, watching them eagerly, pointing at Adira's fin-like arms, her gills, and her fluke, talking behind their hands to one another. Adira sped around a corner and a very strange sight met her eyes.

A whole crowd of merpeople was floating in front of the houses that lined what looked like a mer-version of a village square. A choir of merpeople was singing in the middle, calling the champions toward them, and behind them rose a crude sort of statue; a gigantic merperson hewn from a boulder. Three people were bound tightly to the tail of the stone merperson, and Hermione was not among them, though there looked to be a gap where someone else had been.

Cho was also there, and Cedric swam toward her. There was also a little girl about age 8 with a cloud of silvery hair just like Fleur's, who Adira presumed was Gabrielle. And then there was Sirius, tied between Cho Chang and the gap between him and Gabrielle.

Adira froze, her heart seeming to stop at the sight of her godfather tied up, head lolling in the water. Almost like he was dead. She felt panic rise, and tried to tell herself it was just a game. She swam forward, checking Sirius for a pulse. It was barely there.

 _ **Probably the effect of the enchantment. He doesn't need to breathe if his heartbeat and metabolism are almost nonexistent.**_

 __ _They, you mean. All of them are like that,_ Adira thought as she watched Cedric struggling to cut Cho's bindings with a knife. Adira smacked her head, feeling foolish for not bringing a knife.

The 'ropes' were actually some sort of weed, thick and slimy. She got out her wand and thought hard about what to do. Cedric got Cho free and began to swim upward with her. There was no time left, so she carefully used 'diffindo' on the ropes, freeing Sirius. Adira cast a Featherlight charm on him and tied him to her waist with some of the weed ropes.

Instead of going, though, she looked back at Gabrielle. It was just a stupid game, she reminded herself, but adults had a history of letting her down. Except for Sirius, so far. Could she trust that Dumbledore would keep this little girl safe?

"Get moving," one of the mer-people said to her.

'What about her?' she tried to say, gesturing at Gabrielle.

"You take your own hostage," one of them said to her. "Leave the others."

She looked back toward the puzzle door, wondering where Fleur was. She didn't know how Krum had gotten in here, unless he'd found and solved the puzzle door long before she got there, but Fleur was missing, and Adira didn't really trust adults enough to bet a little girl's life that it was safe.

"Your task is to retrieve your own friend … leave the others."

She couldn't read these mer-people for some reason; their emotions were hidden from her.

Using her wand, she started carving words into the lake bottom.

"We cannot read your writing."

She stopped, at a loss for how to communicate. Then, she took a chance they could read lips and mouthed, 'Her champion missing. I'm rescuing her.'

"Take your own hostage and GO!" shouted the mer-person.

'I don't trust you and I don't trust Dumbledore this much,' she mouthed. 'I'm taking her.'

The mer-people charged forward with their spears, and Adira slashed through the water with her wand, casting another underwater defense spell that created a large and powerful current that tossed the mer-people backwards in a heap of screeching bodies. Wasting no time, she cut Gabrielle's ropes with her wand and cast a Featherlight Charm on her, too. She tied Gabrielle to her waist next to Sirius and swam upward, going slower than she could in case the ropes snapped from too much sudden force, and working her way up to top speed, casting the same spell behind her every now and then, or occasionally summoning more eels, including some electric eels.

She ended up swimming so fast that she splashed into the air. Luckily, the ropes holding Sirius and Gabrielle to her were slack enough they didn't go flying, too. It would've been horrible if she'd gone to all that trouble just to Gwen Stacy them like an underwater Spider-Man at the end.

Tier switched them over to lungs again, and Adira breathed in the cold February air gratefully. She gulped it down, feeling as though she had never breathed properly before, and, panting, pulled Sirius and the little girl up with her. All around her, wild, green-haired heads were emerging out of the water, but they were smiling at her.

The crowd in the stands was making a great deal of noise; shouting and screaming, they all seemed to be on their feet; Adira had the impression they thought that Sirius and the little girl might be dead, but they were wrong … both of them had opened their eyes; the girl looked scared and confused, but Sirius blinked, looked around, and said, "I can't believe that in all the years I spent exploring Hogwarts, this is the first time I've been in the Black Lake. How're you doing, pup?"

"Better. And you?"

"Good. Say, what'd you bring the girl for? Didn't you know we were safe the whole time?"

"Adults have been letting me down most of my life, present company excluded, and Fleur was nowhere to be seen. I couldn't take the risk it was safe. Even if it's true that Dumbledore was ensuring your safety."

Sirius looked at her in concern. "I wouldn't have agreed to this if I thought there was a chance of getting hurt, Addy."

"Yeah, well... I didn't know that. And I probably still would have rescued her, too. Also, you weren't awake. It was creepy down there, especially with all those spear-wielding mer-people."

"Mer-people aren't bad, Addy. They were just doing what they'd agreed to, playing a role. They wouldn't have hurt anyone."

Adira sighed. "I'm too tired to argue the point now. Help me with her, will you? I don't think she can swim very well."

She looked more carefully at Gabrielle, and figured out what the problem was: she was freezing cold. Even Sirius was starting to shiver.

"Here, drink this," she gave a vial of potion to Gabrielle. "It's a warming potion. Just a sip, now, you only need it for a few minutes."

Gabrielle sipped it, and handed it back, her shivering stopping immediately. Adira gave the vial to Sirius, who took his own sip.

As the three of them swam back to shore, Sirius asked, "Just out of curiosity, why only a sip if it's just a warming potion?"

"It's formulated for arctic waters. Drinking it when you're not in freezing water will make you sweat like mad. I nearly passed out from the heat of it, but it was better than freezing in the February air."

Adira could see Madam Pomfrey fussing over Hermione, Krum, Cedric, and Cho, all of whom were wrapped in thick blankets. Dumbledore and Ludo Bagman stood beaming at Adira and Sirius from the bank as they swam nearer. Even Ron came down to meet them. Meanwhile Madame Maxime was trying to restrain Fleur Delacour, who was quite hysterical, fighting tooth and nail to return to the water.

"Gabrielle! Gabrielle! Is she alive? Is she 'urt?"

"She's fine!" Adira tried to tell her, but she was so exhausted she could hardly talk, let alone shout.

"Padfoot!" shouted Lupin, looking worried.

Sirius crawled out of the water and shook himself off like a dog, but less effectively.

"Not to worry, Moony old pal, I'm fine."

The two friends hugged, and when they pulled apart, Lupin began chiding Sirius for going along with this nonsense and worrying him needlessly.

Dumbledore and Bagman were pulling Adira upright, a task made much easier once she was back to normal human form; Fleur had broken free of Madame Maxime and was hugging her sister.

"It was ze grindylows … zey attacked me … oh Gabrielle, I thought … I thought …"

"Come here, you," said Madam Pomfrey. She tried to give Adira some pepperup potion, but Adira pulled back.

"I took a warming potion, Madam Pomfrey. I'm fine, honestly."

"It does more than warm you, now come here," she said, and Adira finally let her take the hot potion. Steam gushed out her ears.

"Adira!"

Adira turned her head, still squeezing water out of her hair with her hands, and saw Luna coming toward her.

"Hey Luna," she said with a smile.

"That was very interesting. I don't think I've seen a real mer-person before, except in books."

"Yeah, I hadn't even seen them in books before, I had no idea what to expect."

"What was that potion you used?"

"It was a warming potion made to be used in freezing-cold water. Found it in a book, and Professor Snape improved on it when we came to him to ask if we could use the potions lab to make it, because he said that the original version was unsafe. In fact, he made Iliana study that potion enough that she thinks she knows why he had to improve it. His improvements increased the range of water temperatures the potion is useful in, and cuts down on the side effects. Which, if her analysis is correct, means the original side effects would have had me boiling alive in the relatively warm water of the Black Lake."

"Professor Snape likes it when people have talent in his class. It took him some time to get used to me, and he wasn't very nice to me for the first year and a half, but after that he got a lot better."

"Really? So it's not just us? I thought it was because Iliana looks like my mom."

"Not just that, probably. Like I said, he's been nicer to me. Lets me experiment with potions as long as I make them according to his method at least once, and also I have to hand in a written analysis of my results when I'm done, which includes theories before the experiments about what I think will happen."

"You experiment with potions?"

"Oh yes. I've known about the magical properties of hundreds of plants and animals since before I came to Hogwarts. Most of the potions he had us making even in second year were ones I had already been making for Daddy for years."

"Wow. Maybe you and Iliana should work together on Potions, help each other out."

"I would like that. I like spending time with Iliana, she's a lot of fun. So are all of you, of course, but her especially."

"She's quite fond of spending time with you, too, Luna. Oh, by the way, there's something in your hair."

Adira flicked a fat beetle out of Luna's hair and watched it fly away.

Hermione came over with Krum then.

"You did pretty good on that puzzle, I hear, Adira."

"Yeah, Cedric helped though."

"Still, you figured out the objective before he did."

"Six heads are better than one," she said. "So to speak."

"You were well outside the time limit, though. More so than Cedric. You and Cedric came through the puzzle door at the same time, so that's confusing."

"I was concerned for Gabrielle, Fleur's sister. I don't entirely trust adults, even Dumbledore, after the life I've had. Plus, seeing Sirius like that..."

"Oh. Well I understand. But Dumbledore wouldn't have let us drown."

"Yes, yes."

Dumbledore, for his part, was conversing in Mermish with the mer-people. After that, he got into a huddle with the other judges to convey his findings. They were still talking when Fleur joined Adira and Luna. Fleur had many cuts on her face and arms and her robes were torn, but she didn't seem to care, nor had she allowed Madam Pomfrey to clean them.

"Look after Gabrielle," she told her, and then she turned to Adira. "You saved 'er," she said breathlessly. "Even though she was not your 'ostage."

"Yes. I had a difficult childhood, that led me to not entirely trust adults. Not even Dumbledore," she repeated for the umpteenth time.

Fleur bent down, kissed Adira twice on each cheek (she felt her face burn and wouldn't have been surprised if steam was coming out of her ears again, even though she knew it was the custom in some countries to greet friends and family like that).

Just then, Ludo Bagman's magically magnified voice boomed out beside them, making them all jump, and causing the crowd in the stands to go very quiet.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached our decision. Merchieftainess Murcus has told us exactly what happened at the bottom of the lake, and we have therefore decided to award marks out of fifty for each of the champions, as follows..."

What followed then was a list of the points. Fleur got 25 points for using the bubble-head charm and giving it her best, even though she got waylaid by grindylows. Krum got back first, well within the time limit, thanks to his use of human transfiguration (he had turned his head into a shark head) and the Placement Charm to subdue the kelpie with a bridle, so he got 50 points. Cedric was five minutes shy of being out of the 2-hour time limit, and got 47 points for his trouble.

Then there was Adira. She was commended for putting her natural transformation powers to good use, as well as using the warming potion to keep from freezing. She had been outside of the time limit, but it was interpreted as misplaced bravery, and she was awarded 45 points for 'exceptional moral fibre.' So third place out of four, but she didn't care; all she cared about was surviving. She had completed the Task, that was good enough. Though the points bonus was a plus.

"Where does that leave us, in all?"

"I believe that puts you in second place, tied with Cedric. Viktor is at first place so far, mostly thanks to today," said Hermione. "Then Fleur at third place."

"Well, tied with Cedric at least makes sense. And there's a justice to it."

"The third and final task will take place at dusk on the twenty-fourth of June," continued Bagman. "The champions will be notified of what is coming precisely one month beforehand. Thank you all for your support of the champions."

"Well that's a relief," Adira said. "I can take a little break, more or less, until then. By the way, Fleur, if it ever comes up again, grindylows have a very weak grip and brittle hand bones, so target their hands."

"Thank you, Adira. I will remember zat."

Notes: Being a neopagan, I had some ideas about what to put in a warming potion, and did some research as well on DuckDuckGo, my preferred search engine. Some of the ingredients, like salamander blood, ashwinder eggs, ice, and sunflower petals, were obvious to me and required no research. My research was mainly for preservatives and balancing agents, except the hematite, as I already knew it was a good stone for grounding. And it's just an iron oxide, so it's not toxic. The lavender was included for its calming properties, since I figured keeping calm under that much black water might be an issue.

Yes, I went back and edited the song in the previous chapters, because I always intended it to be two hours due to the obstacles, but mistakenly left "an hour long" on one line.

According to Google Translate, _Video per aquam_ means "I see through water." If it's mangled, I can't tell, because I only speak English.

It was difficult, and took me over an hour, but yes, I designed that ring puzzle. I tried to come up with something where the middle and outer rings had a logical and fixed set of digits, which can be seen in the 0-7 of the outermost ring, but my math skills and patience weren't up to something that clever.


	34. Turmoil

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 34"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-four: Turmoil**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much.

 _ **Note 3:**_ I have different styles for the internal speech of _**Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _,_ and now _#_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__ and _%_ _ _Mother %__ _._

 _ **Note 4:**_ _J. K. Rowling is goddess of Harry Potter, not me._

 _ **Note 5:**_ _Sorry this took so long. Real life annoyances filled a lot of my time, I lost track of time, and also I thought I had already posted this chapter._

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

A couple days later, Iliana entered the Great Hall and felt a great many eyes on her, more than usual, and they weren't thinking good thoughts, exactly. It was hard to pin down what she was feeling from them in words, especially as the feelings were jumbled. When she saw Ron and Hermione, she knew whatever it was had to be bad.

"So, what's happened that you two are going to hide from me until I insist?"

They looked up guiltily at her, then at each other.

"You might as well tell me."

"Um... well... here." Ron said, handing her a copy of _The Daily Prophet._

She looked at the headline and felt bile rise up in her throat.

 _ **Harry Potter: Attention-Seeking and Manipulative**_

 _The boy who defeated He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is attention-seeking and manipulative,_ writes Rita Skeeter, Special Correspondent _._

 _Potter, the_ Daily Prophet _can exclusively reveal, claims to be several different people in one body, transforming his body physically into different form to match the claimed personalities. Rita Skeeter, your Daily Prophet reporter, has personally witnessed several of these other faces of Harry Potter, including one resembling a younger version of his dead mother Lily Potter, one that resembles a young Sirius Black, a six-year old child form with one eye a different color than the other, and another who looks to have Indian heritage but speaks with an American accent._

 _None of the top experts at St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries have never heard of a condition like Potter's before, and have concluded that Potter simply is a metamorphmagus with a pathological need to be in the limelight._

 _"He's likely addicted to fame and attention, there's really no other explanation," said one specialist. "A human brain can only hold one personality, and a human body cannot have more than one soul. If Potter is claiming otherwise, he is lying."_

 _What is more, the_ Daily Prophet _has revealed another possible symptom of his attention-seeking: a manipulative nature. Your trusty reporter can report that Potter took a Slytherin boy, one Haveer Mandoser, to the Yule Ball in December as his date. Potter, in the form of a young Sirius Black, has been spotted on several occasions spending time with this boy, and has claimed on several occasions that Haveer is his boyfriend._

 _And yet, at that same Yule Ball, Potter switched appearances to his other 'faces' several times, spending most of the night away from his supposed boyfriend. In one of these instances, he was witnessed dancing with one Luna Lovegood, daughter of Xenophilius Lovegood. Miss Lovegood is a third-year student well-known in Hogwarts as an eccentric, just like her father. More scandalous still, his form during this dance was a female one, one that looks startlingly like his mother at the same age, and the dancing was not entirely chaste, by all accounts. Even he seems to have realized this, running off and changing form again after a superb dip with the Lovegood girl._

 _But perhaps this shouldn't be entirely a surprise. After all, young Harry apparently, over the summer, got his legal name changed to Adira Potter, and his famous black-hair-green-eyes birth appearance has been altered to a female version of the same, with longer hair and a feminine physique. But by switching back and forth between these female forms and a pair of male forms, he mocks those long-suffering witches and wizards who have not been able to make such transitions so seamlessly._

 _Also unsurprisingly, despite being brazen enough to enter himself illegally into the Triwizard Tournament as a fourth Champion, he isn't even qualified to do the tasks, requiring help from Professor Severus Snape to create a potion to keep himself warm in the Black Lake during the Second Task._

 _What is more, Harry appears to have a temper problem. During a nice, civil chat with him at The Three Broomsticks, he flew into a towering rage for no apparent reason and used an unknown spell to glue myself and my photographer to the ceiling, forcing us to be rescued by the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad._

 _Aside from preening for his adoring fans, and gaining more notoriety, what could Harry Potter be up to? He's never seen out of the company of one exceptionally pretty Hermione Granger, so is he trying to cheat on his boyfriend with both Miss Granger and Miss Lovegood? I do hope I'm mistaken, neither of those girls deserves to be played the fool by someone so callous and manipulative._

When she finished, she put the paper down with forced calm, then without a word walked in a would-be casual sort of way out of the Great Hall, ignoring her friends' calls to come back. Ron and Hermione tried to follow her, and met resistance from a temporary force field that lasted just long enough for her to slip away.

Once nobody could see her, thanks to a quickly cast Disillusionment Charm, she ran for it, ending up in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom and locking herself in the stall they'd once made Polyjuice Potion in and bursting into wailing tears.

After half an hour, she was still crying, but it had died down in its intensity. After a few more minutes, she felt a warmth starting at her solar plexus and rising up across her shoulders like an invisible hug. She gave a start, wondering if Moaning Myrtle- but that was silly, ghosts are _cold_ to the touch.

 _ _% What so distresses you, My child? %__ _came a soft voice in her mind, a new one. But... a familiar one. The voice had an interesting quality to it, like it smelled of lavender and was made of Spring sunshine._

"Who...?" she said aloud, forgetting herself for a moment.

 _ _% You have not yet given Me a name, %__ _said the voice._ _ _% And so I have none. At least, not in this incarnation, anyway. I have been called a great many things over the centuries. %__

 _ _ **# Are you the one Chandra calls 'Mother'? #**__

 _ _% Yes. That is more of a title than a name, though, really. %__

 _ _ **# How come you've never spoken to us before? #**__

 _ _% I can only come when called, little one. And your pain apparently called Me. Now, what is wrong? %__

 _ _ **# Don't you already know? #**__

 _ _% Yes, but it is therapeutic to talk about it. Plus, we do not always know what troubles us until we attempt to speak of it. %__

 _ _ **# Well I know why I'm miserable. Rita Skeeter. #**__

 _ _% She writes lies. You knew this already. %__

 _ _ **# She writes half-truths, which are worse. #**__

 _ _% Indeed. And which truthful half of one of her Blackest Of Lies so upset you? %__

Iliana thought-spoke nothing. She just sat there, her arms around her knees, silently for several minutes.

 _ _ **# I... I... #**__

 _ _% Take your time, My child. %__

"Luna," she said aloud, but so quietly that one would have to have their ear right next to her mouth to hear it. Then she burst into fresh tears. After a few moments, she felt that hug-like warmth in her body again, holding her like she had imagined a mother would, which only encouraged the tears.

When the tears died down again, Mother spoke again.

 _ _% Luna is a lovely, sweet girl. So why do I sense fear from you? %__

 _ _ **# Mother! What if... what if... I mean... how can I... how do I dare risk our-our friendship? #**__

 _ _% What is it that you think would risk your friendship with her? %__

 _ _ **# Do I have to say it? #**__

 _ _% No. It is your choice. It is always your choice. But you might feel better to say it. %__

 _ _ **# I... I like her. A lot. You know... in the way that's... that's more. Other. Different. #**__

 _ _% Understandable, if I take your meaning correctly. She is a lovely, sweet girl. But you're being a little vague. Could you be more specific? %__

 _ _ **# Ugh. Okay, I like her... romantically. I want to hold her hands, and cuddle with her, and maybe even... even kiss her. I want to spend every moment I can with her, just be around her. I want to tell her how I feel, but I'm... #**__ (her internal voice wavered with suppressed tears, then) __**# Mother, I'm**__ _ **scared!**_ _ _ **I'm**__ _ **terrified!**_ _ _ **What if I tell her, and she never wants anything to do with me ever again? What if I disgust her? What if she hates me? #**__

 _ _% You know her very well. Do you really think that likely? #__

This took her aback. __**# Um... well, no. She's open minded about most things. #**__

 _ _% Does she know about Al's boyfriend? %__

 _ _ **# She knows about Javier being Al's boyfriend, yes. #**__

 _ _% What does she think of Al? %__

 _ _ **# She said she likes spending time with all of us. #**__

 _ _% And she knows about Adira not being 'straight'? %__

 _ _ **# Yes. #**__

 _ _% So what is the realistic worst-case scenario, knowing what you know of her? %__

 _ _ **# I... well... she might... might say she doesn't... feel the same way, about me. #**__

 _ _% And then...? %__

 _ **# She might say I'm in a relationship already and she doesn't go for groups. #**_

 _ _% So you think she'll agree with Rita Skeeter? %__

 _ _ **# Well it's possible. #**__

 _ _% So too is it possible the sun might explode tomorrow. But how likely is Luna to believe that you're faking this? %__

Iliana chuckled. __**# About the same odds as the sun exploding tomorrow. #**__

 _ _% I agree. Now aside from that, what else might Luna do that you're afraid of? %__

 _ _ **# Um... that's it. I mean, I'm pretty sure she'd just let me down easy and then go on being my friend. #**__

 _ _% So all you really have to fear is the uncertainty. Because until you tell her, you won't know for sure, it's still possible for anything to happen, even if many of the possibilities are not very probable in this reality. So all you need to do is find that Griffindor courage, and steel it. %__

 _ _ **# But I'm still scared! Terrified, even. How can I be brave when I'm terrified? %**__

 _ _% Courage is only courage when you're afraid, and you do what you need to do anyway. 'Courage' without fear is merely foolhardy recklessness. Look at Neville Longbottom; his greatest fear is Professor Snape, and yet he never skips classes, and he does his best under the circumstances. He is, perhaps, the bravest Griffindor in all the school, at present. Of course, you already knew all of that, having told him so yourselves. And anyway, Luna's the type who's never going to figure it out unless someone tells her, so you might as well be direct, and TELL HER THE TRUTH! %__

"AHH!" she screamed in surprise at Mother's sudden shouting in her head. A shrill scream came from the other stall in response.

"Oh my goodness, you scared me to death!" came a morose voice from the other stall. A spectral head popped up over the divider and frowned at her. "Or it would've, but well, you know..."

"Sorry, Myrtle. It's just... someone else in here shouted at me suddenly." She tapped her head to clarify her meaning.

"Oh, alright. I forgive you. Even though you came here because you were crying, you did keep your promise to visit me. And I'm flattered. Even though this is usually the quietest bathroom in the school, nobody's ever come in here to cry except for you, in the last decade or more."

 _ _#__ _ _ **Quietest stall in the school? With Myrtle always in here crying?**__ _ _#__ _she thought to herself._

"They probably want to be alone with their grief, and you're almost always in here."

"Does that mean you didn't want to be alone? Or that you did, and you don't consider me a person?"

"You're a person, Myrtle. Don't put words in my mouth, it's not polite. I meant the only person in here to bother them would be you. But now I think about it, I guess that makes sense why they'd stay away. So why'd I come here today? Hmm... well, you and I did meet recently under the lake. Yeah, I think I came here because of that. And, well... if anyone would understand, it's you."

"Oh," Myrtle said, looking unsure what to say. "Yes. Yes, I was on your mind, from the other day, and you came here because of that. It makes sense. Is it anything I can help with? After all, you killed Riddle for me, avenged my death."

"It's just... well, a lot of things. But mostly relationship things. Have you ever fallen for someone and you didn't know if they'd like you back or not?"

"Can't say I have. I've liked people, of course, but I knew they wouldn't like me. Nobody ever does."

"It's a shame you didn't get to live longer, Myrtle. A lot of people are... well, awkward, when they're young. If you'd have lived, you'd have grown out of your awkwardness, and you'd have found love. I'm certain of it. And hey, some people like awkwardness. You might still find someone, if you put yourself out there."

"What's the point? I'm dead. Anybody that fancied me would likely be dead, too. If not, well... I can't see what kind of relationship a ghost and a living person could have with each other."

"You might have a point. By the way, Myrtle, you seem more cheerful than you used to be."

The ghost girl shrugged. "Being avenged helped."

"How'd you find out about that, anyway? I never said 'I shall avenge you!'"

Myrtle rolled her eyes. "I'm not stupid, you know. You went into the Chamber of Secrets after the Heir. You came back alive and carrying that diary thing I heard about. That alone tells me you avenged me, but then later I heard from one of the other ghosts that the heir had been Tom Riddle! Is that true?"

"Yes, it was."

"He came back after all that time?"

"He's not known as Tom Riddle anymore. His new name is Voldemort," she said, simply.

Myrtle's eyes grew wide with horror, but then a thought appeared to cross her mind, causing her to relax and start to giggle. Her giggles then became full peals of delighted laughter. She was soon doubled over with ringing laughter that echoed off the walls.

"What the-?"

"I was killed by the Dark Lord himself! Me! Miserable moping Moaning Myrtle, killed by someone famous! And probably one of the first people he ever killed, if not the first! Oooh, the other ghosts are going to be so jealous!" Myrtle said, practically singing, and flew off with a skip in her step.

 _ _ **Some people are amused by the strangest things,**__ Al commented.

Iliana jumped. She had, for a time, forgotten she wasn't alone in her body. Aside from Mother, that is. But she recovered quickly, and decided that if Myrtle of all people could find happiness even in death, then she could at least try to not be miserable herself.

She checked the time. She'd missed History of Magic entirely, but there was still 20 minutes until Charms started, so she had time to make herself look normal again before going back out there.

Though she didn't want to talk about it, and didn't cooperate with Ron and Hermione, they talked about the article anyway in Charms.

"Clearly she didn't bother asking Healer Young, from what Iliana's said about him. He's a top expert at St. Mungo's, after all," Hermione said, looking at Ron.

"Nah," said Ron. "She interviewed him, I know it. She probably didn't consider him a 'top expert' because what he said didn't match her angle."

"I told you guys I don't want to talk about it."

"Well that's good, then," snapped Hermione, "because this conversation is between Ron and me, and you weren't invited." Her tone was softened with a smile at the end.

"You're talking about me!"

"We're talking about an article in the Prophet," Ron said, catching on. "The fact you happen to be the subject of the article isn't important. And anyway, we're not the only ones talking about it. At least we're on your side."

Iliana sighed, and ignored them.

Potions class had, for weeks after Iliana had gone to Snape about the potion, been unusual. Snape wasn't exactly ignoring her, but he wasn't being his usual snappish self toward her either, and he wasn't exactly being... well, truth be told, he was treating them like they were just another Griffindor, nobody to be singled out for any reason. It was refreshing. Of course, this behavior didn't extend to Al or Zoey, just Adira and Iliana, that they saw.

But there was more. Whenever Snape was sitting at his desk, Iliana kept catching him looking at her and, for some reason, Hermione. But especially Hermione. She didn't know what that was about. The one time he caught her looking at her, the expression on his face was... well... thoughtful. But not like he was thinking about her, exactly. Like he was considering something related to her in some way. But how could that be, when the other person he kept looking at was Hermione? But then, once she thought of it, she realized that had been his expression the entire time he was considering both of them.

The weirdest thing, of course, had been that Snape hadn't reacted to Rita Skeeter's article at all, at least not that she had seen or heard of. It basically accused him of cheating to help the child of the man he still hated, and there'd been nothing, no reaction to it at all. Even the Slytherins had noticed, she'd heard some of them whispering about it.

Then, on the Friday following the Second Task, the day after Iliana had cried in the bathroom, Snape seemed to come to some decision. In his older, more familiar tone of snappishness that had always been reserved for Hermione or one of the Potters, he'd commanded Hermione to stay behind after class that day.

"What're you picking on her for again? Sir." Ron said waspishly.

"How I choose to discipline students, and the reasons for it, is up to me and me alone, Mr. Weasley. Now I suggest you get back to work before I give you a detention for your impudence."

That shut Ron up, just barely. There were a lot of angry mutterings from the Griffindors, and the Slytherins seemed pleased. But Iliana suspected something unusual was going on here, something that wasn't punishment for some perceived crime.

At the end of class, Snape glared at Iliana and snapped at her to get out so he could speak with Hermione alone. Reluctantly, she did. But she put her ear up to the door to try to hear in. Ron peeked through the keyhole.

Hermione nervously went up to Snape's desk, clutching her books to her chest, and said, "You wanted to speak with me, sir?"

"Yes, Miss Granger, I did." He looked at the door, but made no attempt to ward it from eavesdropping, as Iliana knew he could.

Turning back to Hermione, he conjured a chair and bade her sit. She did, looking very confused by this, but no less anxious.

"Miss Granger. In second year, several ingredients went missing from my private stores. Very interesting ingredients, too. Boomslang skin and horn of a bicorn, both rather rare and expensive."

"Sir, I-"

"Silence! I did not give you permission to speak. Now, strange as it may sound to you, I am not here to enact delayed punishment for your theft. I merely wished to point something out to you, which will lead to my eventual point soon enough."

He sat there, thinking, he fingers steepled. Hermione was too curious and scared to speak as she waited for him to finish thinking.

"Miss Granger, do you have any thoughts on why I have been so hard on you these last three and a half years?"

She blinked. "What? I... well, um... because I'm Adira's friend, and you hate her?"

"I can see why you would think that. But that is not the reason. Miss Granger, do you know what legilimency is?"

"Legilimency is an arcane magical art that allows a witch or wizard to look inside someone's minds, and use what they see to verify someone is telling the truth."

"Correct. Now, I am trusting you with an important secret here, Miss Granger. Do I have your word to keep it quiet?"

"I... well, yes, you have my word."

"Good. The secret is that I am a legilimens, and I use it at times on my students."

"But that's illegal! It's illegal to use legilimency on a minor!"

"You swore to keep the secret. Do you wish to go back on your word?"

"Well... no. No, I'll keep it secret."

"Good. Now, I tell you this only because you need to understand that I can see more than mere truthfulness in someone's eyes when I use legilimency on them. I see only what comes to their mind at the time. But that can often be more illuminating than one would think. In your first class with me, I saw within you a potential to be great at potion-making. But I was very annoyed at your tendency to regurgitate the contents of the textbook at me."

Hermione looked very confused. Iliana and Ron looked at one another, also confused.

"I don't understand, sir, what's the problem with that?"

"I am going to ask you something, and I wish you to look into my eyes when you do. Yes, like that. Did you brew the Polyjuice Potion in your second year at this school, before Christmas?"

"Yes sir, I did, but-"

Snape sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Miss Granger, I have already explained that you are not in any trouble. I merely wished to confirm something I already suspected."

"But why, sir?"

"Because, Miss Granger, the Polyjuice Potion is an incredibly advanced potion. There are few witches or wizards who could have brewed it even in their seventh year at Hogwarts. There are few people who brew potions for a living who wouldn't have trouble with it. And I am quite certain that neither myself nor my mother, talented at potions as we both have been, could have made perfect Polyjuice Potion in our second year. Not even Lily Potter could have done it, and I have never met a more talented potioneer than her, myself included. And from what I understand, Miss Granger, the only mistake you made with that potion was that you almost used a hair that-given whose robes it was from-was almost certainly a cat hair."

Hermione swallowed a lump in her throat, her eyes wide. She hadn't been certain it had been a cat hair at the time. Only Al's words had kept her from using it.

Snape stood up and began pacing back and forth, his hands behind his back.

"I am the first to admit I am not the greatest teacher. I never wanted this job, I was never much good at tutoring, much less teaching. But I had no choice in the matter, so I muddle through. Still... there have been fewer Aurors and Healers since my students started getting old enough to graduate, so I am aware that my teaching is substandard, and my attitude is lousy. Despite this, I kept on without changing anything about my teaching style.

"There are limits, too, to how much I can improve. I cannot go into details about why, since you do not know occlumency, so you will simply have to take my word for it. That said... on a whim, I took a chance on Iliana Potter, when she came to me about that warming potion. She is... above average as a potion maker. She has potential to one day become a Healer or an Auror, or even a passable teacher of the subject once I leave this job.

"You, Miss Granger, are another matter altogether. You have an incredible mind. You brewed Polyjuice Potion in your second year here. You got past my riddle protecting the Philosopher's Stone the year before that. I hear you helped figure out that the monster in the Chamber of Secrets is a basilisk, too. You could be a Potions prodigy, girl, but all I ever see of that talent from you is memorized lines from the textbook, and potions in class that are exactly the quality of the instructions I put on the blackboard. No improvements, no experiments, no small, sub-conscious alterations, just exactly what is expected of you, and nothing more.

"Then there's your essays. They are long, and detailed, and remind me of myself at your age except that my passion was actually Defense Against the Dark Arts, but there's still something lacking in your work. You never put things down in your own words, you never explore beyond the parameters of the assignment, you never question what is written in the books, even after figuring out from Gilderoy Lockhart that books and their authors are fallible! You could be a virtuoso of Potions, eclipsing my own talent by the time you were in your sixth year, and going on to invent new potions the likes of which I can't even imagine, if you didn't keep limiting yourself all the time! And that, Miss Granger, is why I have been so cross with you all these years!"

He had punctuated this last by slamming his hands down on the desk and staring her down. While she gaped at him, he stood up straight again, and went over to the blackboard, tapping it with his wand. It displayed a potion's instruction on the board.

"If I told you to brew this potion for me right now, what would you say to that?"

Snapping out of her shock, she looked at the instructions and nodded. "I c-can do that now, sir, if you w-want."

"Just like that, would you? I say jump, and you don't even wait to ask how high before jumping? You barely even looked at the instructions, Miss Granger, and you're going to make the potion, just like that, on demand? Without even reading it through carefully first? Sorry, correction: I'm sure you will indeed read it carefully, first, memorizing it to make sure you don't make any deviations from the instructions."

Hermione started to cry, quiet tears rolling down her cheek. She was also shaking her head, looking extremely confused.

"Do I have to spell it out for you? Give you a riddle to solve in a dungeon chamber or dangle a known mystery in front of you, and your mind attacks it like a pit bull attacking a juicy steak. Where is that wickedly beautiful, devilishly clever mind of yours in class?"

She continued to cry and look confused.

Snape put his wand down and massaged the bridge of his nose again. Then he slipped out of sight of Ron and Iliana, was gone for less than a minute before coming back.

"Here, Miss Granger, drink this. It is a Calming Draught."

Silently, she obeyed, swallowing the vial's contents.

Once she had calmed down enough, Snape sat down at his desk.

Much more calmly, he said, "I have given you a puzzle to solve, Miss Granger. It is there, on the blackboard. Solve the puzzle, please."

She looked up at the instructions again.

"It's... it's not a puzzle, sir, it's just instructions."

"It is both instructions and a puzzle."

With this knowledge, Hermione's mind seemed to switch gears. Iliana and Ron recognized it, as they took turns at the keyhole; it was her Solving A Puzzle face.

After several minutes, her eyes went wide and she turned deathly pale, dropping her books and shaking like a leaf.

"So you have solved the puzzle, then?" Snape asked.

Mutely, she nodded, her expression horrified.

"What is the answer to the puzzle?"

She didn't answer right away.

"I cannot give you another Calming Draft so soon after the previous one. The previous one should, in fact, still be working. It must be, as a matter of fact, for you have not run screaming from the room yet."

"Th-th-the ins-ins- th-they're wr-wrong. S-sir."

"They are? How so?"

"If I were t-to have m-made that potion, as wr-written... I... the whole room..."

Snape sneered. "Most likely this whole section of the building, in fact. At this time of the day, given our location, I'd say... a hundred dead, many more wounded. And you never questioned it."

Hermione suddenly turned a ghastly shade of green. Snape casually conjured a bucket, and she was very loudly sick into it. For nearly ten minutes.

"Of course, the odds of this catastrophic of a screw-up are very slim indeed. Most who would be foolish enough to make such a mistake would have blown themselves up years before graduating Hogwarts, much less becoming a teacher, and the kind of knowledge it takes to know how to mess up on that grand a scale is thankfully very uncommon. But I hope I have made my point, Miss Granger."

She nodded, still looking rather ill.

"And that point would be...?"

"Instructions... could be wrong?"

"Yes. Even experts can make mistakes. People are fallible. People write books. Therefore, books are fallible."

She nodded once again, mutely.

"You will have extra instruction from me, which will be a Gifted Class. You will tell nobody, except for Weasley and Potter, the true nature of these classes. If anyone asks, tell them that these are detentions. Do not look at me like that, Miss Granger; nobody would believe for a moment that you needed remedial lessons, and there is no other excuse that would make enough sense to go unquestioned. That said, if anyone does question why Hermione Granger is having so many detentions, tell them Dumbledore can confirm it, for he will be able to by then. But to avoid that unpleasantness, use Potter's invisibility cloak to get to and from these classes, if she lets you."

"Why? Why can't you just admit what they are?"

"Learn occlumency with Potter first, if you wish to know the answer to that. Now, your first lesson will be next Friday at 7 pm. Do not be late. You are dismissed."

After thinking over the weekend about what Snape had said to Hermione, on Monday Al called Sirius and asked him to buy some books from Muggle stores about how to teach chemistry, if he could find them.

"Why d'you want books about _that_ , pup?"

He thought about it for a few moments, then said, "I want to sneak them onto Snape's desk. Either he'll read them and become a better teacher or he'll burst a blood vessel in his head. Either way, it's a win."

Sirius barked with laughter. "An excellent prank, pup, if a bit unorthodox. Yes, I'll scour Muggle London and find the perfect book for you, okay?"

"Thanks, Sirius."

On March First, Ronald Weasley woke up in the morning to the sight of Zoey Potter standing next to his bed, staring at him intently.

"GYAH!" Ron shouted, jumping backward in the bed.

Zoey giggled at him. "Hippo Birdy, Ron!" She blew on a kazoo to punctuate her sentence.

"What're you doing in here? Why were you standing there staring at me in my sleep? And wait, what was that about a hippo?"

"Hippo Birdy! You know, like Happy Birthday, only funner!"

"What's all that noise over there?" asked Seamus.

"It's Ron's birthday," she said, again blowing on the kazoo.

"Oh," said the drowsy Irish boy. "Well happy birthday, Ron. Many happy returns."

"Er, thanks, Seamus."

Dean and Neville soon woke up, too, complaining about being awoken by Zoey's kazoo. Ron only just now noticed that Zoey was dressed like one of the Three Musketeers, for some reason.

"Miss Zoey Potter, Dobby has brought you the cake you requested for your Weezy," said a familiar high-pitched voice from the door of the room. A tall cake appeared there, Dobby balancing it magically on his head. It was several layers thick, and looked like it weighed as much as Dobby did.

"Thanks a bunch, Dobby. Set it right there, we'll have cake for breakfast!"

"Cake for breakfast?" Ron said.

"It's your birthday, having cake for breakfast is your right and privilege! Wait, hold on a sec first," she said, sticking a bunch of candles on the cake and lighting them with her wand.

The twins, Fred and George, came into the room then, pulling a confused Hermione along with them. "Zoey told us you were having a birthday party in bed-"

"-and of course we had to join in!"

"You practice the song I got from Sirius?"

"You can bet your tiny hiney we did!" George said.

"What?" Hermione asked, confused.

"Okay, boys, hit it!"

Fred pulled a pair of drums out from behind himself, handing one to George. They began to beat out a tune that sounded strangely depressing, more like a gloomy war song than a birthday song.

"What're you-?" started Ron, also confused.

The twins and Zoey started singing in unison, the drumbeat still going.

" _Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!,_ " the song started, the twins pounding the drums especially hard on the 'UH.'

" _It's your birth-day, UH! It's your birth-day, UH!_

 _Birthdays come but once a year, Marking time as Death draws near!_ _Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _Though you're just fourteen years old, you're not too young for battle woad! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _Just some centuries past I vow, you'd have been married off by now! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _First one lesson you must learn:_ _first_ _you pillage,_ _ **then**_ _you burn! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _May the cities in your wake, burn like candles on your cake!_ _Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _Death, destruction and despair, people dying everywhere! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _Burn the castle, storm the keep, kill them all but spare the sheep! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _May your deeds with sword and axe, Equal those with sheep and yaks! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _Just be glad the friends you've got, Haven't found out you-know-what! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _I'm a leper, can't you see? Have a birthday kiss from me! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH!_

 _Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH! Happy Birth-day, UH! HAPPY BIRTHDAY,_ _ **UH!**_ _"_

The song ended then, the room echoing with laughter, hooting, and hollering. Even Ron, confused as he'd been by the strange song, joined in laughing.

"Blow out the candles and make a wish!" Zoey said.

As soon as Ron stopped laughing, he blew out his candles, and everyone in the room cheered. The cake was cut, Ron getting the first piece of course, and Zoey doled out the rest.

"That was a really weird song, Zoey. Where'd Sirius find it?"

"Oh, apparently the summer after Sirius graduated, he wandered into a Muggle event called a Renaissance Faire, where people dress up like they're in the Renaissance era or the middle ages or dark ages, having feasts, jousts, bard circles, and a bunch of other things besides. One of the bard circles was singing several versions of that song. I came up with a version of it just for you, though, Ron."

"Well it's weird, but brilliant. Just like you. Thanks, Zoey!"

Zoey bowed with a flourish. "Thank you for thy praise, kind sir. Tis a shame we put rat droppings in thy cake."

Everyone paused, trying to decide if she was kidding or not. Zoey broke out into high-pitched squeals of laughter so hard she fell over onto her back and clutched her stomach, tears of mirth streaming down her face. Since this didn't clarify anything, people started to look warily at their pieces of cake.

"I-" she tried, still laughing. "I was- I was just joking. But you should've seen your faces!"

Dobby folded his arms and frowned. "She is making things up! We is never letting anything gross into the food, no sir! Dobby is offended you would even suggest it, little Miss!"

Zoey stopped laughing, and hugged Dobby, her big floppy Musketeer hat getting in his face. "Sorry, Dobby. Just a bad joke. I should've known better."

"Yes you _is_ ought to be knowing better. But Dobby is forgiving Miss her slight."

The rest of the party went well, Dobby and a couple other elves bringing in breakfast food from the Great Hall so the party could continue as long as possible. Zoey had found a magical antique phonograph record player somewhere and had apparently gotten a bunch of rock 'n' roll albums from Sirius to play on it, including ACDC, Led Zepplin, The Beatles, and The Alan Parsons Project. She put on The Beatles as the most likely one to be universally liked, and they got through almost the whole album before they had to head to class. Zoey wanted to help Dobby clean up, but he insisted he liked working, so she left for class.

Later that day, they started the party up again after dinner, during which time Ron got his birthday presents from everyone.

Ever since her first talk with the one called Mother, Iliana had made it a mission of hers to find Her a name. Using their new knowledge of how to work the library, she'd directed whoever was Out to scour the library for books of names.

On the Wednesday following Snape's odd after-class lecture at Hermione, Adira was spending one of her study periods reading books of names for Iliana. Or rather, Iliana was controlling Adira's body at the time without them transforming. Which was fine by Adira, she had been tired all morning. Again. It was happening a lot more often, and she was getting suspicious about the reason, seeing as they hadn't had any nightmares as far as they knew of. Of course, it had been happening every week or so for years now, but it appeared to be happening more and more often these days.

Iliana had, ever since her first talk with Mother, had more talks with Her to figure out what names would be fitting. During one of these conversations, Iliana had asked about something Chandra had once said, that seemed to suggest Mother was a goddess of life or magic or something of that nature. Mother had confirmed this, saying, _% Magic does not really have a personality in the way humans would think of such things, but it can spin off avatars of itself into the brains of certain individual humans, avatars that are as limited and different from Magic Itself as an ant's brain would be to a human brain. I'm one of those manifestations. There have been others over the centuries. %_

And so it was with that information that Iliana finally found a name for Mother, that day.

"Mother, I hereby name you Avani Maznah."

 _% Lovely name. What does it mean? %_

 _#_ _ **Avani means 'Earth' and Maznah means 'Glorious.'**_ _#_

 _% It is very fitting. Thank you for giving me a name. Avani Maznah. I like it. %_

"You're welcome," she said aloud, but very quietly.

"Hello Adira," a familiar, dreamy voice said from behind her. Iliana – who was still 'driving' – whirled around.

"Luna!" she squeaked. "How... how are you?"

Luna sat down next to them, and glanced at the book of names.

"I'm quite well, thank you. I was wondering, though... I haven't seen Iliana around much lately. Ever since the Yule Ball, that is. I like spending time with her."

"I like spending time with you, too, Luna."

"Oh, is that you, Iliana? You're... 'deriving,' I think it's called."

"Er, close. Driving. Um, deriving would be an arithmancy thing."

"Ah, yes. Driving. Like a driving wind. I see."

"More like driving a carriage. Or a car."

Luna nodded. There was a lull in the conversation for several long moments before she spoke again.

"I hope that Rita Skeeter article isn't the reason you're not spending as much time with me, Iliana."

That, of course, had come out of nowhere, making the gears of Iliana's mind screech as they tried to shift mid-thought. She tried to say something, but all that came out was an odd mix of mixed-up syllables.

Their body began to glow and wobble, an unplanned transformation in the works, but the feel of it was scarily familiar...

"Iliana, what's wrong?" Luna called after her as she ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

Immediately, there was an earth-shaking BOOM that rattled the library bookshelves, and Luna ran from the room, afraid for her friend. Ms. Pince followed her, and soon people were pouring out of other classrooms to see what was the matter.

They found... well, the Potters had become another strange hybrid. Part of their hair was long and red, another part long and black, or short and black, or in a few streaks it was as white as paper but was an odd texture. Their skin was patchy, varying from the pale white of Iliana to a brown so dark that it was practically black. Worse, they had two and a half arms (with the half arm growing from the other arm), absurdly short legs, and one of their hands had eight fingers, while another had three.

Unlike the last time this had happened, unbeknownst to most of the people there, they hadn't been carrying anything Inside except for the Philosopher's Stone, which had remained Inside them.

"Oh my goodness," Professor McGonagall said when she saw them passed out and strange-looking. "What happened?"

"I don't know, Professor," Luna said. "We were talking in the library, when she started to glow and wobble. She ran from the room, and then there was that explosion."

McGonagall bent over them and checked for a pulse.

"They're alive. Miss Lovegood, please go to Professor Dumbledore and tell him what's happened. I'll take Potter to the Hospital Wing."

Luna nodded, and walked off to go do as instructed. McGonagall floated Potter along with her wand to the Hospital Wing, shooing the gawking student away first.

When Dumbledore came into the Hospital Wing, Sirius was with him.

"What happened?" Sirius asked Luna.

Luna recounted what happened again, looking very worried. Sirius nodded.

"Well it's similar to something that happened over the Christmas holidays," he said. "Given what Zoey said about it later, I think it's caused by powerful emotions, possibly also mixed emotions. But they didn't hybridize like this last time, just became Zoey."

Their body glowed again, and settled into Iliana's form, right in front of the three witnesses. Madam Pomfrey came over to check on them.

"Still passed out, I'm afraid."

"I woke them up with a spell last time."

The matron nodded and cast 'rennervate' on them. Iliana blinked at the light, sitting up.

"What happened? Where-why am I in the Hospital Wing?"

"You exploded again, pup. Only this time you hybridized again."

Panicked, Iliana looked down at herself.

"I seem fine now."

"Yes, you shifted while you were passed out."

"Any idea why you exploded this time, pup?"

Iliana felt her face grow hot. "I... it's private."

"Oh, I see," Sirius said in a tone of voice that told her she'd said too much. Of _course_ Luna had told them they were talking beforehand. She felt stupid, then.

"Do you think it likely you will be doing it again soon?" asked Dumbledore in concern.

"I don't think so. I was... taken by surprise, before." She looked significantly at Luna, who smiled. "And, well... if it was _just_ strong emotions, it would've happened a lot more frequently. It would've happened the day I read that horrible Skeeter woman's last article about me. In fact..." she thought about what had made it happen the last time. "Odd. I assumed it happened the first time because we had too much stuff being held Inside, but we didn't have anything except, well, a certain stone. That didn't come out, did it?"

"By all reports," Dumbledore said, "there was no debris this time. Just a very loud explosion. Whatever is causing it, I do hope you can get it under control."

She felt her face turn red again. "I hope so, too."

"Well, Sirius, I think we should discuss a few things in my office, don't you?"

"What? Oh... yes, you're totally right, of course, Dumbledore." Sirius said, winking at Iliana. Far from encouraging her, it made her feel ill.

"Madam Pomfrey, can I go? I feel fine."

"Pardon me, young lady, but when students go around exploding, _I_ will tell them when I feel they can go. So stay right there. I will make sure you and your friend are not eavesdropped on, if that's what you're worried about."

"Right. Thanks, I guess," she said as the matron left the room.

Luna came closer to Iliana and took her hand in her own, looking up with half a smile.

"Will we be able to talk without you exploding again?"

"I... I think so. But, well, if not... just run. I don't want you getting hurt."

Luna nodded. "I had fun dancing with you during the ball."

Iliana tried to smile, and grimaced instead. "Sorry, lost control of my face there."

"That can happen sometimes. Really bad nargle infestations can do that, on occasion."

"Ah, okay. I'll look into fixing that. Anyway... I had fun dancing with you at the ball, too."

"I thought you did. You seemed to. I _did_ wonder why you ran off, though."

Illiana's mind froze, then. Her hands shook. She was so _scared_. She'd seen so many horrible TV shows thanks to Dudley where telling a friend that you fancied them messed up the friendship, and read similar things in books. She looked away from Luna, trying not to cry, but a tear rebelliously rolling down her cheek anyway.

It was mad, she knew; she couldn't go on like this, not knowing. She couldn't forget her feelings, either. There was only one way to solve the problem, but she was so scared of the answer, of the potential fallout, that she was still mute.

Luna sat down on the bed next to her, still holding her hand.

"Iliana... I... I've never had a friend before you. Ginny and I were acquainted before that, but we weren't really friends until later. So I'm not very experienced with this whole 'friends' thing. I don't know what's going on, but I've worked out it has something to do with that Rita Skeeter article. I know I was mentioned, and she said some odd things about you and Hermione that I didn't understand either. I'm not sure how I was meant to fit into her story. I can only wonder, from my previous experience, if your behavior means... if it means you don't want to be friends with me anymore? I'll understand if you don't, but-"

Iliana burst into tears and grabbed onto Luna like a mother desperately trying to save her drowning child. She wailed into Luna's robes, and Luna – her eyes even wider than usual – just sat there, stiff, still confused.

Between sobs, Iliana tried talking. Haltingly, her voice distorted with emotion, she told Luna things like "No," "Not it at all," "You're my friend," and even a garbled "I love you." It was all very jumbled, but Luna got at least part of the gist.

"Okay, so you don't want to stop being friends with me, that's good. I'm relieved. But I'm still confused about why you're so upset."

"I... at the dance, I... that dip... I felt something. Something I hadn't... something I didn't recognize. Something that scares me. But it's something I have to be brave about. I... I... Luna, I fancy you." That last was said so quietly that Luna almost didn't catch it, but catch it she did.

"You... fancy me?" now Luna's face was turning red, while looking baffled. "Me? I... nobody's _ever_ fancied _me_ before. Why me?"

Iliana sat up and stared incredulously at Luna. "What? Whadda ya mean 'why me'? Luna, you're funny, intelligent, open-minded, honest, kind, compassionate, creative, easy to be around, and it doesn't hurt that you're easy on the eyes."

 _#_ _ **Oh god did I really just say that?**_ _#_ she thought, her face turning hot. _#_ _ **I mean, it's true, but jeez...**_ _#_

Luna blinked in confused bewilderment. "You think I'm pretty? Really? You're not just winding me up?"

"Yes, Luna, I _do_ think you're pretty! It wouldn't matter to me if you weren't, because of your inner beauty, but I _do_ think you're pretty. No, correction: I _know_ you are. You're beautiful."

Luna shook her head, looking down. "No, no. I'm plain. My hair's a mess, I know it. I never cared, it never seemed important to me. I wash it now and then, and I comb it enough to keep it getting tangled up, but beyond that I don't care. And... and my eyes are weird, everyone says so."

"Your eyes are beautiful, Luna. Stuff anyone who says otherwise."

"And I dress weird, I know. You don't know _how_ weird; I tone it down at school, because I don't want my best things stolen like other stuff gets stolen. Anything I really want to keep I have to leave at home."

"Weird? _Weird?_ You wanna talk weird? I'm weirder than you, Luna, I know weird. I don't mind weird one bit. I _love_ weird!"

"Oh Iliana, aside from being many people in one body, you're basically normal."

Iliana huffed. "Well now I'm offended! Normal _indeed._ We survived a killing curse as an infant, got raised by bigoted evil gits who tried to keep us from our birthright, we can speak to snakes and detect when the dark lord is nearby thanks to a curse scar, we turned out to be a whole mess of people sharing a single body, and then remember you're including Zoey and Chandra and Tier in there when you go calling us normal. _None_ _of us_ are normal! We befriended a weeping ghost and a freed house elf, Javier has some kind of something going on with him that affects his behavior, Hermione has instant recall of anything she's ever read and can brew potions that would challenge seventh years but worries constantly about failing her classes, Ron is a poor kid who's a chess whiz but also a slacker who still manages to pass all his classes, my godfather sleeps in a doggie bed sometimes, and me and all my close friends are the Hogwarts social outcasts and misfits. If this were a Muggle high school, I'd be counted among the freaks and geeks, and so would all my friends. And my godfather, too; he and my father were the Weasley Twins of their day. 'Normal' my left nostril!"

Luna laughed at this. "Very well reasoned. Okay, I'm sorry for calling you normal, Iliana. But still... you really fancy me?"

"Yes! I want to hug you, cuddle you, hold your hand, and maybe even kiss you!"

Iliana's face went red. Luna looked down at her hands.

"I'm not, like, freaking you out or grossing you out, am I?" Iliana asked, biting her lip in worry.

Luna looked up again, smiling, a tear rolling down her cheek.

"No, you're not doing either of those things, Iliana. I'm just touched by your words."

"Um... cool. But, er... I'm kinda curious, you know... about, well, how _you_ feel. About me. But well, I can see where you might need some time to consider it."

Luna looked thoughtful for a moment. "That dance took me by surprise as well. I'm still not sure _what_ I feel. I've never felt... it sounds cliché, but I've never felt this way about anyone before. I don't know what it means. I don't know what it _is,_ if it's even the same thing you're feeling at all. I'm not ready to put any greater significance on it yet."

"Wh-what does that mean?"

"It means I don't know if this is a sign of something deeper about myself, or if it's just how I feel about you. And, well... even if I _did_ know, Daddy and I have never liked labels. Even if I do find a label for it someday, I need more information. But the kind of information I need isn't the kind I want."

"What kind of information do you need?"

"Hmm... I'm not sure. But I think part of it would involve dating boys."

"Oh. And, er... what kind of information do you _want_?"

Luna turned to look Iliana in the eye, thinking a moment before speaking. "The kind that starts with me asking if you want to go to Hogsmeade with me this Saturday."

"Uh... yeah? Wait, I'm confused... are you saying you want that, but you're not doing that because you need to date boys first, or what?"

Luna smiled at Iliana. "I don't really care what I need, in this instance. I'm not likely to get it anyway, not anytime soon. So yes, I'm asking you if you want to go to Hogsmeade with me this Saturday."

Iliana's grin was suddenly so wide it was painful. She toned it down then said, "Yes. Yes! I would like that very much, Luna. Very much indeed."

Luna smiled, too. "So... meet you at the castle entrance after breakfast that morning?"

"Yes! I'll be there even if I have to have Zoey force a transformation!"

"Good," Luna said. Then a sudden thought occurred to her, judging by her face. "Um... Al and Javier...?"

"What? Oh, you mean... er... well, strangely enough, they didn't make plans for Hogsmeade this time. Their relationship is in this odd place where they're getting to know each other better, still. They kinda went into their relationship full steam ahead and then realized they didn't know each other very well. They're going to become close friends first, if they can, and then see where it goes from there."

"Oh. Well I wish them luck, whatever they decide. But I'm glad it frees the weekend for us."

"Me too."

A pause. Then, "I know that article in the Daily Prophet upset you. I talk to Myrtle sometimes, and she let slip you'd been crying. I hope... well... are you going to be able to weather similar storms that come your way? Without exploding, I mean."

"I'll be fine, Luna. I was crying that day because I was upset that something so private, something I hadn't decided what to do about, was aired publicly. That woman is going _**down**_ **.** But I can handle her vitriol. Especially now."

Luna smiled again, but still looked concerned. "It's just... well, you did just feel so much that you literally exploded."

"Um, yeah. But I was able to recognize it and ran out of the room into the corridor. I think next time, I'll be able to calm myself down. Or have Mother or Zoey pull me Inside."

Luna smiled, more genuinely this time. But then she looked thoughtful again.

"Oh, wait a moment... was Rita Skeeter implying that you, Al, Javier, Hermione, and me are all in some kind of... love pentagon?"

Iliana laughed. "Well from her perspective it would be a love _square_ , I think, but essentially yes, that was the implication."

"Well now I see the fullness of why you were so upset. I don't know how to put it into words yet, though."

"That's fine. Don't worry about it, I'm better now you and I are going to Hogsmeade."

"I'm glad you're feeling better."

"By the way, Luna, I should tell you something that I thought of over Christmas break, about Hagrid riding Sirius's motorcycle, since we're both already in the Hospital Wing."

Aside from Hogsmeade, Iliana and Luna also made plans to study Potions together on Wednesday nights, since Iliana, for all she was above average, could still use help getting better. Thursday nights were occlumency lessons with Dumbledore, and Friday nights were the extra Potions lessons with Snape, which Iliana had with Hermione.

Though she and Hermione were in the same extra class with him, they were doing different things. Snape, who had taken her essay about the Viking's Arctic Vigour Potion last Friday, handed it back today. She had a relatively high mark, considering it was still Snape. He had circled a few things in red and made clarifications and comments on them.

"Your essay, Miss Potter, was refreshingly intelligent, despite a few mistakes which I circled. I will expect your work in my other classes to meet or exceed that standard, understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. It's a pity the both of you weren't in Slytherin, I could have gotten you well past your current benchmark if you had."

"Would you have, though?" Iliana asked. "You seem to hate Adira and Al. And you didn't seem terribly fond of me, either, until recently."

"You have a point there. But I think if you had been in Slytherin, it would have shocked me out of my loathing for your father's memory and Alastair's resemblance to Black. It would have been so astonishing to me as to make me open my mind, I think."

Hermione, who had blanched before Iliana had responded to Snape, finally spoke. "Wait, m-me? In Slytherin? A _Muggleborn_ in Slytherin?"

"Yes, Miss Granger. It would not have been easy for you, as there are some pretty hard-line blood purists in my House, but enough of the Slytherins are neutral or better that I think you'd have done well in Slytherin. But I suppose we shall never know, now."

"Well maybe, but... but the Hat wouldn't have done that, surely? I mean, Salazar Slytherin only let in purebloods."

Snape gave her a weird look, somewhat peevish. "Yes, Miss Granger, but that was a thousand years ago. There were a great deal many more wizards and witches back then, as well as a war on between magicals and Muggles. Things have changed rather a lot since then. I myself, a half-blood, would likely not have been able to get into Slytherin back in those days. The Hat has had a very long time to adjust to the changes."

"Oh," said Hermione.

"'Oh' indeed. At any rate, Miss Granger, we should discuss why the two of you are in these extra lessons together."

"Er, yes, I _had_ wondered about that myself, sir, given your, er, speech to her," Iliana said.

"Yes, I knew you and Weasley were eavesdropping. I did not mind, obviously. Some of what I said to Miss Granger applies to you as well. You showed remarkable knowledge of potions ingredients, and their interactions. You, too, have been under-performing in my class, Miss Potter. Thus, the two of you are here so I may attempt to help you unlearn that behavior. And it will work best with you in the room at the same time."

 _ **It might have something to do with the fact you were being such a git to us in class,**_ Al thought. Snape had not been looking at them at the time, though, so he couldn't have overheard it.

"Now," Snape continued, "since Miss Granger was not here for your lesson on the Viking's Arctic Vigour Potion, I will be covering that potion with her. You, Miss Potter, should think more about the potion as well, but please do not attempt to answer any questions about it yet. I want to see what Miss Granger makes of it. I will start by putting the original potion on the board."

He tapped the blackboard, and the original, outdated potion from the book appeared on it. Hermione read it, already tackling the problem as a riddle to be solved, and spent a few minutes thinking about it before speaking.

"That potion isn't formulated for the Black Lake," she said. "I can tell, because I'm fairly sure someone would cook like a lobster if they tried it, even in February."

"Indeed. So how might you counteract that?"

Hermione thought some more, and finally came up with some of the same ideas as Snape had. He prodded her on, giving hints here and there in his usual obscure fashion, and over the course of half an hour, she worked out the rest.

"See that! _That_ was the brilliance I saw in you, that you kept hidden! That's the kind of thinking I wish you to bring to _every_ Potions lesson, Miss Granger. You too, Miss Potter."

The three of them discussed the potion a little more, and Hermione ended up coming up with another modification to the potion.

"If you use a third less bundimun solution when you dissolve the hematite, that should adequately dissolve it, while further strengthening the potion's stability. At least, it seems that way to me, sir."

The corner of Snape's mouth twitched upward, as he did the arithmancy to confirm or deny her claim. It felt to Iliana like he already knew the answer, and was double-checking. Sure enough, when he put his quill down, he nodded at Hermione with satisfaction and approval.

"Quite right, Miss Granger. The modification you proposed would indeed have that effect, increasing its shelf life by another few days. Of course, only the most expert potioneers should ever try that. Use even one nanogram less than that exact amount, and the hematite does not dissolve enough, which results in a potion that is very unstable and turns into a very tall column of fire. Regardless, a clever addition."

Hermione beamed at the rare praise.

"Now, on a slightly different note, Miss Granger, I am going to try you on some advanced potions in these extra lessons, a bit of a head-start on your N.E.W.T. levels. But be warned, I may sometimes slip in a mistake or two here or there, so keep on your toes. I will not be giving you anything terribly difficult, despite your prowess with Polyjuice Potion, not at first, anyway. It is my hope to gauge your capabilities before moving on to truly difficult potions. But they will still be N.E.W.T.-level potions, understand?"

Hermione nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Good. But that will be next time, as we are running out of time tonight. In the meantime, Miss Granger, I shall be interested in your own essay about the composition of the Arctic Vigour Potion, and please do remember to think before writing, instead of just regurgitating the textbook. Treat every bit of Potions work from now on as a puzzle to be solved. Understood?"

"A puzzle. I understand, Professor. But, um... how long shall I make my essay, sir?"

Snape smirked. "However long as you are able to make it, in a week. As long as it is still sufficiently interesting to hold my attention. I would rather you turn in a short yet thoughtful essay than a long, boring, and thoughtless essay."

"Okay, sir, I'll do that."

Iliana raised her hand.

"Yes, Miss Potter, I have not forgotten you. You will be evaluated as well. You do well enough in your current level, I shall try you on a fifth-year potion next time. Your assignment will be to check a fifth-year Potions book out from the library and read as much of it as you are able to before next Friday. Understood?"

Iliana nodded.

"Good. Now, before it gets too late, you should both head back to your dorms."

They nodded, gathered their things up, and headed back to their common room.

"If someone had told me last semester that Snape would be praising me and you regularly, even if not in public, I would've thought they were mad," Iliana said.

"Me too."

They continued walking in silence for a while before Hermione, who had been side-eyeing Iliana for some time, finally spoke.

"So, I hear you and Luna are going to Hogsmeade tomorrow."

Iliana's face was red again, but it faded quickly. "Yes, we are."

"As a date, I hear."

"You heard correctly."

"I have to admit, I didn't really expect that, though maybe I should have. You two seemed to hit it off right away, when you met on the train."

"Yeah, I didn't see it coming either. I had no idea I had feelings for her until that dip at the ball."

Hermione giggled. "I don't know if you noticed or not, but there were rather a lot of catcalls about that dip at the time. A lot of people noticed it."

"Oh yay," Iliana said, without any enthusiasm.

"Fred and George in particular were taking bets on how long it was til you two started to date, in fact. I think Seamus Finnigan won that bet, come to think of it."

"Is there a hole around here that I can crawl into?"

"Sorry to make you uncomfortable. I think it's sweet. Romilda Vane isn't happy about it, though."

"Who?"

"Romilda Vane. She's a second-year. She's another one of those who fancies you for stopping You-Know-Who."

"Er... me?"

"Well, the lot of you. When I pointed out to her earlier this year that there's only three boys in your collective, and that one of them can't talk without difficulty and doesn't really have his own human form, she didn't seem to mind. I don't think she's, well, into girls, generally, but she's into famous people."

Hermione gave the Fat Lady the password and they walked in. Iliana made sure nobody was eavesdropping before they continued.

"Sounds like someone to be wary of, this Romilda Vane. Which one is she?"

Hermione looked around the room. "She must be upstairs or something. But she's hard to miss. She has curly hair, a prominent chin, large dark eyes, and she's rather loud, with a dramatic voice. She's also pushy, conceited, and overly self-confident."

"I'll try to avoid her, then. She sounds like the female version of McClaggen, and I've had problems with him, too."

"Yes. I wouldn't normally have bothered telling you about her, though, because when Al and Javier started dating, she backed down a bit. But then you and Luna got together, and she seems to have decided you're back on the menu. Probably hoping to snag Chandra, is my bet."

"I think our limit is two people at once. It's hard enough managing that much, I don't even want to think about a third. Besides, I think Romilda Vane and McClaggen should probably consider going with each other."

"McClaggen isn't famous, though. You are."

"Well I'll burn that bridge when I get to it," Iliana said.

Endnotes: Iliana's conversation with Mother/Avani is in the same style as some of the conversations I have with my own version of Mother/Avani, Djao'Kain.

The birthday dirge is a real song, with a great many different versions, and it's been around at least since 1975.

Admittedly, the first explosion at Christmas was largely a whim, that I did because the image of Zoey in the midst of a tinsel explosion made me laugh so much I had to include it. This second explosion was a similar whim, because it was a nice dramatic way to express the chaos in Iliana's mind. I don't plan to make a habit of these explosions, though.


	35. The Date and The Sleepwalker

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 35"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-five: The Date and the Sleepwalker**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _and_ _Zoey_ _, and now #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and now between hashtags/pound signs because some people's computers don't do the B.I.U.)**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__ _and %_ _ _Mother AKA Avani Maznah. %__

 **Note 4:** All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!

 **Note 5:** A guest commented "You got rid of the main character, so to me this is no longer a Harry Potter fanfic." My comment: "SIGH. Harry is transgender in this fic. Harry is a trans girl in this fic. Her new name is Adira. This is not the same thing as getting rid of Harry as a character, it's just a change to the character. I really wish people would stop making ignorant comments like this."

And frankly, even if I had gotten rid of Harry and replaced him, it would still be a relevant plot point. In our own collective, we're not actually sure whether or not our "host" (the "original" person in this body) is even still alive, because we're not sure Tempest is actually the host or not. It's complicated why that is, too much so to get into here, but still... we aren't sure. And we personally know at least one other collective where their host isn't exactly dead, but is so shriveled and weak for Reasons that she might as well be dead. It's kind of sad, actually, because her parents think she's the same person as before but no, the host left someone else in her place to pretend to be her.

That said, I'm **not** going to do that with this fic. More likely I'll save it for one of my original stories.

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

On the morning of the Friday before the Hogsmeade weekend, Iliana got an owl from Healer Young at breakfast. She was confused, as she hadn't been expecting a letter from him. She opened it and read it.

 _Dear Adira,_

 _I want to express my anger on your behalf over that horrible Skeeter woman's article about you. She truly is a disgusting human being, and I'm sorry you have to put up with her lies._

 _I was also wondering if it would be alright if I could send the_ Prophet _a letter to the editor correcting some of her ridiculous lies and half truths on your behalf. I won't include any information from our sessions, obviously. Just what I know of you from times we've met outside of sessions. Is that fine by you? If not, I'm sorry I brought it up._

 _If you agree to this, let me know which parts of the article I should and shouldn't address._

 _Yours in fellowship,_

 _Healer Yonas Young_

It was difficult to know what to have him address or not, especially now that Iliana and Luna had planned a date for the next day, but with some help from Iliana and the others, working off and on through the day, they got a list together for him and sent it off with Hedwig.

During their next occlumency class with Dumbledore later that day, they had a vision of Sirius's library at night, which they recognized from a previous session. A few minutes later, they saw a scene from the Hogwarts library at night, in a part of the library they'd certainly never been to at night, as far as they knew. This added to Adira's existing suspicions about the cause of their increasing number of tired days. Iliana wasn't convinced, though, and Al scoffed at the very idea.

 _ **Are you trying to say you think there's someone in our head that only comes out at night? Who manages to drive the body while it's asleep and sneak into the school library at night without getting caught? How can you be sure one of us isn't just sleepwalking?**_

 _I can't, yet, but now that I'm suspicious, I'm remembering some other things. That book that was missing from Sirius's library for a while before mysteriously showing up again, the books we had to stop reading because of massive amounts of deja vu, and books in our collection we didn't recognize, for starters._

 _ **Sounds like circumstantial evidence at best, to me. Maybe we're just forgetful. There's a whole bunch of us, and some of us were missing for a while.**_

 _Yes, well... it's enough to justify further investigation._

 _ **I guess that's a fair point. How do you plan to investigate?**_

 _I don't know. But I'll work something out._

 _ **# I might as well help out, #**_ Iliana said.

Before going to bed the night before her date, Iliana put a sign on the doorknob just in case they were right about someone new sneaking around at night. The sign said "Whoever you are, we know you exist. It's safe to talk to us. You don't have to hide."

When she woke up the next morning, the sign was undisturbed. This didn't prove or disprove anything, unfortunately.

She got up and looked around the room for any signs of the hidden Other having been here. It took her almost half an hour, but finally she found a possible clue: there was some bunching in the rug that indicated the trunk had been shoved out of position and whoever had done it hadn't bothered to put it back right. But as clues went, it was pretty much useless; one of them might have done it without realizing. So she looked for more clues, but nothing else was apparent.

 _ **Now that I think about it, if this person is hiding, it stands to reason they're not going to respond to us, as that would kind of give them away. Assuming there's actually anyone there.**_

 _Fair point, that._

Iliana got ready for her day, dressing for her date with Luna, and went down for breakfast. On the way, she ran right into Professor McGonagall.

"Sorry, Professor."

"It's alright, Miss Potter, I'm not hurt. Are you?"

"No. You going to breakfast too?"

"No, I've already eaten. I was, in fact, coming back from the Great Hall. It's a bit late in the morning for breakfast, isn't it?"

"It's still going, isn't it?"

"Well, yes. But you're usually such an early riser, aren't you?"

"No Quidditch this year. I've been sleeping in."

"I see. Well-"

"Speaking of that," Iliana interrupted, "we think there's another new person in our collective. Well, relatively new. They've been sneaking into the library at night all school year long, we think. But the evidence is pathetic; just some images in our head sometimes. We tried getting confirmation last night, but it didn't pan out."

"Oh? What did you try?"

"We left a sign on the doorknob inviting them to stop hiding, but when we woke up this morning, it was still there. The only other thing was a rug bunched up a little. Lame, I know."

McGonagall looked thoughtful, though.

"Wait, do you know something?"

"I'm not sure, Miss Potter, but there have been odd things going on around the school since you started here. Filch has been complaining about Mrs. Norris taking longer than usual in the library for the last few years, like she can smell something but not well enough to catch anyone. During the same span, Ms. Pince has been complaining about finding books slightly out of alignment, like someone was putting them away in the dark. Percy Weasley once mentioned having bumped into someone invisible by the library, weeks after the fact when something reminded him of it. He'd been distracted at the time by Peeves, who threw ink in his face.

"Then," she continued after clearing her throat, "speaking of Peeves, last year he claimed someone was sneaking around down by the Slytherin dorm entrance. Made a huge racket about an intruder at the height of the Sirius Black panic, brought a dozen teachers and prefects running. When Professor Snape questioned him, he indicated in his usual infuriating manner that someone invisible had been sneaking around, and tried to hex him. At the time, we attributed it to his usual mischief-making, but there have been other little things here and there to indicate the mysterious night-time library visitor was visiting the Slytherin corridor as well."

"Really? That's odd."

"Well, it's possible they were on their way to the kitchens and got stopped by Peeves that one night."

"Huh. Well the plot thickens, as they say."

"Of course, it's entirely possible these are all unconnected incidents, but as you say, you suspect someone in your group of sneaking around at night. So it's a logical possibility."

"Yeah. Years, though? That's odd. I only became aware of the possibility this year."

"Yes, a great many little things that make sense together, Miss Potter. Even Mr. Rahasyamay's astounding demonstration of practical arithmancy, when he unstuck Misters Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle from one another."

"Really?" she asked, intrigued. "Why do you think that's relevant?"

"Well, unless someone in there is teaching themselves Arithmancy at a high level and passing it on to Mr. Rahasyamay at least, I don't see how else he could have peeled apart that spell without it exploding. Come to that, I don't see how he'd even know it was possible without knowing at least _some_ arithmancy."

"Makes sense I suppose. Were there any other reports?"

"Oh let's see... only other thing I can think of offhand is the occasional misplaced book in the library that Ms. Pince was certain were in their right places when she closed up the night before (most of which have been arithmancy books lately)."

"Huh. Well I can only remember one of us going to the library at night, and it was just one time. Adira – Harry at the time – went into the Restricted Section to try to find out about Nicolas Flamel, and had the misfortune to open a screaming book."

"Ah yes, I remember hearing about that from Filch. It wouldn't have mattered which book you'd chosen, either; in that section, they're _all_ spelled to scream if someone opens them without authorization, especially at night."

"Good to know. By the way, if you had all these reports like that, how come nobody ever accused us of doing it? We're the only body in this school known to own an invisibility cloak."

"Well Professor Snape suspected you, of course, but there was never any proof, and the Disillusionment Charm exists, so we never accused you. Also, Professor Dumbledore indicated at least once that if you were skilled enough to leave no more trace than that and not get caught, then that was an impressive accomplishment in his opinion."

"Uh, okay," Iliana said, her stomach growling. "Anyway, I gotta go if I'm gonna get breakfast, Professor."

"Enjoy your meal, Miss Potter," McGonagall said with a small smile before walking off.

Iliana nodded, and went on to breakfast.

Sitting down across from Hermione, she immediately began piling food onto her plate as fast as possible and held her plate away from the table in case the house elves whooshed it away before she could eat it. Hermione watched this, looking up from her newspaper every now and then. When Iliana finally put her plate down on the table again, her eating slower now, Hermione slid the newspaper over to her.

"Here, read this," Hermione said.

"UGH! What now?" she said, voice weary with resignation.

"It's good news. Read the 'letters to the editor' section."

Iliana opened the paper and scanned it until she saw what Hermione was likely talking about. It was a letter from Healer Young.

 _Subject: Inaccuracies in a recent article._

 _Dear Editor of the Daily Prophet,_

 _I am writing to address inaccuracies in a recent article by one Rita Skeeter. Specifically, I am responding to her article about 'Harry Potter' being attention-seeking and manipulative. First, I wish to point out that Skeeter is using the wrong name. The child formerly known as Harry Potter is legally now named Adira Potter, and should always be referred to as such, for her previous name is no longer relevant as it is no longer her name. I find it very hypocritical of Ms. Skeeter to claim to be defending transgender people while using the wrong name and pronouns for a now openly transgender individual._

 _I can also say with great confidence, having met the Potter collective on several occasions, that every personality living in that body are kind and gentle souls who despise their fame, hate the attention it brings them, and want nothing more than to be as normal as possible. None of them would play around with someone else's emotions; it wouldn't even occur to them to do so. They are all honest and up-front with their friends, and naturally defensive around people like Ms. Skeeter who consistently tell falsehoods about them._

 _On that note, I can attest that Ms. Skeeter's claim that "none of the top experts at St. Mungo's" have heard of Potter's condition is a lie, because I am a Mind Healer at St. Mungo's and am as much of an expert in the condition as it is possible to be, without having the condition oneself. The condition may be relatively unknown in the wizarding community, but the Muggles are much more aware of it. Awareness of the condition, called Multiple Personality Disorder – or Multiple Consciousness Complex as I prefer to call it – has even permeated their popular culture, even if these popular depictions are highly inaccurate in an often malicious way._

 _Yes, there are many in the Muggle sciences of psychology and psychiatry who disbelieve in the condition, but those communities also have a great many people held in high esteem who believe in the condition. There is even more evidence of the condition from the Potter collective. During the First Task, they cast multiple corporeal patronuses at once, and each member of the Potter collective has a different patronus. From previous experience with the same charm, all their patronuses are consistently tied to a particular individual. As the majority of experts on the Patronus Charm will agree, the patronus is a reflection of a person's soul. There is no known way, even by the likes of Dumbledore, to purposefully change your patronus. Nor has anyone on record ever cast multiple patronuses at once. The fact that they can all make different Patronuses – and many patronuses at the same time – tells us that there are multiple souls in that one body, however this came to be._

 _But on a less esoteric level, Ms. Skeeter's claim that the Potters lost their temper during a civil conversation is patently false. I spoke with several witnesses of the incident in question, and the conversation was far from civil. Along with Ms. Skeeter using the wrong name and pronouns for the individual whose face was presented at the time, the conversation started with Iliana Potter overhearing Ms. Skeeter talking about falsifying an article about Ludo Bagman and calling her out on her lies, as well as berating Ms. Skeeter for violating the privacy of one of her friends, Mr. Hagrid, whose kindly character was falsely assassinated by Ms. Skeeter in this paper. Ms. Skeeter's response to this was to again use the wrong name and try to leverage Ms. Potter into an interview by offering to give a truer account of Mr. Hagrid, which Ms. Potter naturally declined, seeing as Ms. Skeeter seems incapable of telling the truth. What finally precipitated the argument turning to hexes was when Ms. Skeeter insulted another friend of Ms. Potter's, right to this very friend's face. The hex in question was a harmless one, sticking Ms. Skeeter to the ceiling, which was surely more annoying than anything else._

 _Furthermore, I spoke with everyone I could find at the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad, and none of them have any recollection of being called to Hogsmeade that day, or any other day within that week. The spell that Ms. Skeeter insists required such imaginary assistance wore off in 20 minutes, as she knew it would, Ms. Potter having told her so. And from eyewitness reports, it seems the spell even made her drift slowly to the ground, so no harm was done. Ms. Skeeter's only wound from the incident was, by all accounts, to her pride. What's more, the spell only affected Ms. Skeeter, which makes sense; Ms. Potter had no quarrel with Ms. Skeeter's photographer._

 _As to the relationships held by the members of the Potter collective, they are of no concern to anyone but the people these relationships involve, and such speculation is best left to the pages of gossip magazines, not to serious newspapers. Perhaps the editors of the_ Daily Prophet _should put a tighter reign on what their reporters write, to avoid low-quality writing getting into their paper._

 _I would like to end with a reminder to Ms. Skeeter that Ms. Adira Potter and her godfather Sirius Black are both very wealthy individuals, and that – understanding I do not speak for anyone but myself – if_ I _were to have their riches, I would be very tempted to sue both Ms. Skeeter and the_ Daily Prophet _for libel, if Ms. Skeeter were writing such lies about_ me.

 _Sincerely,_

 _Healer Yonas Young_

Iliana burst out laughing at this, Ron grabbing the paper from her as she fell off her seat onto the floor, laughing fit to burst.

"Miss Potter!" an annoyed voice said, bringing her to attention. It was Snape.

She immediately stopped laughing and got up off the floor.

"Miss Potter," he said more quietly now that she was sitting up. "If you do not wish to miss your Hogsmeade trip today, I suggest you keep the noise down in the Great Hall."

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

"Good. Ten points from Griffindor, Potter."

She nodded, but he was already swooping away like a human bat. She sat back on her chair and went back to her food.

Halfway through her hurried meal, Luna came over and stood next to her, looking a little nervous, but excited.

"Sorry to come bother you during your meal, Iliana. You can focus on your food. I just wanted to sit over here until you were ready, if you don't mind."

Swallowing, Iliana said, "Sure thing, Luna. I don't mind at all. In fact, I welcome it."

"Oh, good. Thank you, Iliana." Luna sat down primly next to Iliana.

Iliana noticed that Luna was dressed nicer than usual. She hadn't done anything new with her hair, but she was wearing a dress that was a riot of sunflowers. Luna's shoes were also shiny and black and flat-soled. Everything else was the same for Luna, necklace of butterbeer corks and radish earrings included. Iliana felt better now about her own simple blue dress, black shoes, and silver earrings. She also wondered what Luna's 'nicer things' that she left home looked like, if this was the nicest of her normal clothing she brought to school.

"Excited?" Iliana asked, as something to say.

"Yes. I've never been on a date before. I never thought I would, either. Even if I had, I never would have expected it would be with another girl. But I like you a lot, Iliana, so it feels good."

"Ditto to all that. What should we do?"

"I don't know. What do people usually do on dates?"

"No idea. Only thing any of us have been on that might have been considered a date was when Al went out to eat once with Javier. So I don't really have much experience."

"We could eat somewhere in Hogsmeade later, if you want. That sounds lovely."

"I agree. So that's one thing added to our plan for the day. Er... we could also go to the shops. Like Honeyduke's, Zonko's, and some of the others. I know there's a place to buy wizarding equipment and supplies, as well."

"I've been to Honeyduke's before, that's always fun. I haven't been inside Zonko's before, though. A little too noisy for me, but if you want to go, I can tolerate it for you."

"Oh? Well, I don't really get anything there usually. It's more Zoey's thing."

They kept talking about possibilities as Iliana finished and they went outside and started going down to Hogsmeade. They walked a bit awkwardly at first, but as they got into the flow of conversation, that eased up somewhat. Luckily, their tardiness in getting started meant that there was no sign of Malfoy or his goons.

"So I like your dress, Luna. It's very colorful, and nice."

"Thank you, Iliana. Yours is nice as well."

"Not nearly as nice as yours, just a plain blue dress. By the way, how are those modifications to your trunk going for you?"

"My things have stayed put since then. The trunk keeps most of the nargles away from my things. Though sometimes I forget to put things back, and they go missing again."

"What are you missing now?"

"I'm currently missing my beetle earrings, some stripey socks, and a book called 'Easy Spells to Fool Muggles.'"

"Okay, I'll help you find them later. For now, though, we're almost to the village."

When they got into the village, the first place they went was Honeyduke's, which was packed with people. Luna stood close to Iliana the whole time, looking uncomfortable with the noise, or perhaps just the closeness of it all. Iliana noted privately that if Honeyduke's was enough to bother her, it was no wonder she didn't like Zonko's. Aside from being more packed than Honeyduke's most Hogsmeade trips, it was also louder to begin with, with the bangs and pops and other loud noises from the prank items.

While they were at Honeyduke's, Iliana bought Luna a blooming chocolate rose made of actual chocolate, which doubtless utilized a spell similar to the one that animated the chocolate frogs. Even better, it smelled like a real rose. Luckily, rose petals are edible anyway.

After Honeyduke's, they checked out Dervish and Banges, the wizarding equipment shop, admiring the various items on display. Luna told her about a store at Diagon Alley that was also a wizarding equipment shop, but catering to people like Luna and her father. Iliana smiled at this, curious what such a place would look like.

Next, they wandered to Tomes and Scrolls, a bookstore. Unsurprisingly, Hermione was there, browsing their selection. She tried pretending she couldn't see them, to respect their privacy, but it was plain she was curious how their date was going. They didn't stop to talk, though.

They'd each bought books there, and Luna didn't have anywhere to put her own books, so Iliana put them in her little bigger-on-the-inside bag around her neck, which Luna was so fascinated by that they went back to Dervish and Banges to get one for herself. It was a bit too expensive for her to get herself, so Iliana offered to get it for her.

"You already got me that chocolate rose, though."

"A trifle," Iliana said. "I don't mind buying this for you. Whether we're girlfriends yet or not, we're still friends. Let me get this for you."

"Oh, well... if you want to, I suppose so."

"Good. I don't like to tell people this, in case they think I'm bragging, but my parents left me a fortune, so this is no issue for me. Heck, we're the source of all those Nimbus 2001's the school got back in second year. Er, I guess that would've been your first year."

Luna's eyes went wider than usual. "Wow, Iliana, that must have cost a lot."

"Most expensive thing we've ever bought. Was very nearly physically painful, spending so much, even though we knew we could. Even what I spent on that chocolate rose is more money than we used to have in our whole life, with the Dursleys."

"Well thank you very much, Iliana. I hope, whatever happens, we'll always be friends."

"Me too."

They'd started so late that by then, it was lunchtime. So they went over to The Three Broomsticks to order some lunch and butterbeers. Iliana looked carefully around the room, but didn't see a certain annoying reporter or her sidekick. So they sat down and ordered, talking idly while they waited for their food, then between bites as they ate.

They talked about this and that; Luna talked of how her father's magazine, The Quibbler, was doing, and some of the content of it. Iliana was having so much fun she didn't notice most of the people looking at the two of them; either these others were remembering the _Prophet_ article, or word had gotten around about their date. She found she didn't really care, either way.

One person in particular she failed to notice was someone she would have liked to have known was there, a certain someone who spotted them leaving the Three Broomsticks hand in hand and walking down the main street again, talking and exploring. A someone who grinned to herself and began to follow them, to see what she could dig up.

"So what should we do now?" Iliana asked. "We've been to Honeydukes, been to the book store and the wizarding equipment shop, and we just ate. What else is there to do around here?"

"I don't know. The Owl Post Office, a greengrocer's, I think there's an herbology store, a hat shop, a potions shop, and I think there's a sports equipment shop as well. Oh, and Madam Puddifoot's Tea Shop, but I don't like that place. Too small and cramped, and it's much too popular with couples."

"Yeah, and Gladrags, Ollivanders, the hair salon... not many useful options. Well, I'm out of ideas, Luna. For now. I'm sure I can think of something later. I think my nerves are freezing my brain a little."

Luna paused, standing still and thinking for a few moments. Then she took Iliana's hand again.

"Come on, I want to show you a nice little place I know about."

"Er, okay. Lead on."

Luna led her down the main road of Hogsmeade and down past the stile at the end of it. They hung a left after a few minutes and walked along a dirt path that looked carved once by simple wear and tear of people's feet, but was now returning to nature. The path climbed up a hill covered in dry grass that had patches of snow on it, winding around the hill in a vague spiral. The climb was rather steep, the path getting narrower and narrower, rocks and even small boulders becoming more common as they got higher up. Iliana strongly suspected this path was a deer path, as both she and Luna were sweating and panting with the effort of the climb, and the going was slow because the path was so narrow.

After nearly a quarter hour's difficult climb, they came out at the relatively flat top, where a huge oak stood tall, its barren branches only just starting to turn green with buds.

The view from under the tree showed them the whole village, and the castle in the distance. It didn't look quite as nice as it probably did at other times in the year, this being only the beginning of March, but it was still a very nice view. Beautiful, in a transitional sort of way.

"I like to come up here on Hogsmeade weekends," Luna said. "It's nice and secluded. Strangely, nobody else seems to have found it. At least, I've never seen anyone else up here. But then, it _is_ a bit of a climb."

"That's an understatement, Luna. I'd call that a hike."

There was a raised spot by one side of the tree that turned out to be the perfect spot for the two of them to sit and just watch the idyllic scene together while leaning back against the trunk of the tree.

"We're not out of bounds up here, are we?"

Luna shrugged. "Is it important? As long as we get back to the school before dinner, nobody's likely to look for us up here."

Iliana's face felt hot to her, then. She wasn't sure why Luna had brought her up here. As much as she liked Luna, she didn't want to rush into anything. Especially since she wasn't entirely sure she could avoid exploding again, and an explosion up here could send Luna or them both falling to their deaths.

Luna leaned her head against Iliana, watching the village below. Perhaps hearing Iliana's heart beating fast, she said, "Just relax, Iliana, and enjoy the view. You said before that my energy is placid and calming to you, when you let yourself get lost in it. Well this scene is like that for me. You should try to feel the same way. I promise that's the only reason I brought you here. For today, at least. Remember, I'm new to all this, too."

"Oh. Well that's a relief," Iliana said, and felt herself relax. She made a mental note to not relax _too_ much; they didn't need to fall asleep up here and get in trouble.

After a minute, Luna added, "Well, there's also the fact that I know you don't like attention from people who aren't friends, and there's not much more private a place to spend time in Hogsmeade than up here."

"It's lovely, Luna. Thank you for showing me this place. I can see the little buildings in the distance, like those collectible model houses you often see around Christmas time, except it's mostly spring now. Still cute and pretty, though."

"Yes. And all the little people walking around down there, too."

"And the grass and trees, the light and shadows. And it's just the two of us, nobody to bother us."

"Yes, we'd see them coming before they could surprise us. But I don't think anyone will; I don't think anyone else knows about this place."

Iliana nodded, sighing contentedly. Glancing down, she saw a fat beetle crawling on her left hand and flicked it away hard with her right, irrationally irritated by the insect's intrusion. The beetle hit a small boulder and fell to the ground by Luna's leg, on its back and looking very dazed by the impact, but eventually it managed to get back up on its feet, though it still looked very concussed, wobbling around drunkenly on its feet.

 _'What is this? Do I smell lunch?'_ came a quiet voice from inside Iliana's jacket. Aqua, their pet grass snake, slid out of her master's jacket and toward the concussed beetle, flicking her tongue at it hungrily. Oddly, Iliana thought she felt a spike of panic from the beetle before it hurriedly flew away, Aqua just missing it and bit air instead. Iliana frowned at this oddity, but was too drowsy and relaxed to think about it.

A strong breeze wafted through, making both girls shiver. Iliana cast warming charms on them both, and silently chided herself for not dressing more warmly. But then, she hadn't known they would be climbing to the top of a tall hill today. The chill woke her up some, so they were able to snuggle and talk again for a while.

"Any chance I could meet your dad over the summer, Luna?"

"Maybe. I haven't told him about us going on a date yet. He wouldn't mind, it's just that it didn't really feel real until now. But I think when I get back to my dorm, I'll write him a letter about it all."

"Including my explosions?"

"Yes. He'll find it fascinating."

"Have you written him about us before?"

"Oh yes. I told him about Chandra, and Al, and you, and Adira. I told him how you helped me keep track of my possessions by having people you trusted put strong wards on my trunk. Daddy is quite pleased that I have such good friends."

"What did he think of the Yule Ball?"

"He was glad I had fun, even if I didn't have a date for it. Oh that reminds me, he wanted me to tell you 'thank you' for convincing me to go to the ball, because he hadn't seen me so happy in a long time."

"I think I know how he feels. I like seeing you happy."

Luna smiled more, which looked funny to Iliana because her view of Luna was upside-down. But Luna didn't have anything else to say just then, so she just snuggled closer to Iliana.

The wind through the tree's branches and the dry grass was soothing, like a lullabye. With the warming charm making them nice and toasty, nothing to talk about at the moment, and to sounds of nature soothing them, the two girls' eyelids got very heavy. Soon Iliana had Luna's regular breathing to add to the soporific sounds lulling her into an unplanned nap.

Iliana dreamed of flying through the air, without a broom, holding hands with Luna as the two of them swooped through the sky. In the way of dreams, they were trying to find somewhere specific, and kept getting turned around or distracted by things. Sometimes the dream had them underwater instead, but in a brighter-lit and more colorful place than the Black Lake.

Then they were flying again, until they began floating on a cottony cloud, but warm, Luna cradled in her arms as the warm, uniform light illuminated some passing geese flying in a V formation. One of the geese broke formation and flew right at her, but instead of honking, it shouted at her.

"MISS POTTER! WHERE THE DEVIL ARE YOU?"

She and Luna jolted awake, Iliana's wand out and pointing at the sound, which had emanated from a silvery cat, a patronus.

"Professor McGonagall?"

"IT'S ALMOST DINNERTIME AND NOBODY'S SEEN HIDE NOR HAIR OF YOU SINCE LUNCH! ARE YOU SAFE? ARE YOU STILL WITH MISS LOVEGOOD?"

The patronus winked out, then.

"How the heck does she expect me to reply? I don't know the talking patronus trick."

"Well, try just talking to your regular patronus."

"They usually go charging off before we can talk to them."

"You usually expect it to do so. Try expecting it to wait."

Nodding, Iliana concentrated on her patronus waiting for a message. " _Expecto patronum_!"

Her first few tries yielded nothing, as it was difficult thinking of a happy thought _and_ expecting the patronus to wait at the same time, but on the fifth try, she got it.

Her shining silver Muggle-style Chinese dragon patronus burst out of her wand and then turned its head toward her, waiting.

"Um, tell Professor McGonagall that Luna and I are safe, and we'll be there soon as we can. We, er... we lost track of time."

It cocked its head curiously at her, still not moving, otherwise.

"Well, go on, go tell her."

It nodded, then flew off on a direct path to the village. As it did, she and Luna stood up, stretching to get the creakiness of sleeping against a tree out of their bodies. Luna was still stretching when Iliana looked at the treacherous path they had to climb down with apprehension. She was about to say something about it to Luna when McGonagall's cat patronus returned.

"Your rather clumsy talking patronus attempt aside, it's good to hear you're safe. I won't punish you this time for your tardiness, but try not to make a habit of it. Just come back safe. I'll be waiting at The Three Broomsticks for you." Then it winked out again.

"Luna, how are we going to get down? I don't fancy the climb down now that I'm looking at it."

"Oh, we don't need to _climb_ down, silly," Luna said, pulling her wand out from behind her ear.

"Why not?"

"Because I'll just cast Featherlight Charms on us, and we'll _jump_ down."

"Er, is that safe?"

"Sure it is. We'll float down to the ground like feathers. It'll take us no more than five minutes."

"Well okay, I trust you. Hold on a moment first, though."

 _'Aqua? Where are you?'_

 _'I am back in your warmth, human,'_ Aqua said from inside Iliana's clothes. Now that she'd heard this, she felt the snake wrapped around her arm up against her skin.

"Okay, my pet snake it still with me. We can go."

Luna first cast the charm on Iliana, then on herself. Iliana stood at the edge and looked down, too anxious to move. She'd never defied gravity without a broomstick or other visible means of support, before, except obviously in dreams.

"Do you need a push?" Luna asked.

"That would help, yes."

Bracing herself against the ground first, Luna pushed Iliana off. There was a spike of panic, but luckily it didn't trigger any transformations before she realized she was floating, and felt the fear disappear.

By the time Luna jumped off, the top of the hill was already passing the top of Iliana's head. Luna used her wand to pull herself down a little faster so she could get close enough to Iliana to take her hand so they could float down the rest of the way together.

"By the way, Luna," Iliana said as they floated down toward the ground, "I forgot to ask when your birthday is. We know Ron's, and Hermione's, so it's a huge oversight we forgot to ask you when yours is."

"My birthday? It's the day before Valentine's Day."

"Oh, sorry about that. I'll get you a belated birthday gift by owl order."

"There's no need for that. You got me this nice pouch necklace. The fact you didn't know it was a birthday gift at the time makes no difference."

"Er... well, maybe that's true for you. But I feel it's the intention as much as the gift itself. I want to get you something specifically for your birthday."

"If you want to. But you don't have to. It's not your fault you didn't know. You've had a busy year."

"Yeah, but we met last year, remember? So that's _two_ birthdays I missed."

Luna smiled. "You're such a generous, kind soul. One more thing to love about you."

A sudden gust blew them off course, Iliana clutching Luna in a panic. Luna, though, calmly used her wand to pull them back on course.

"Well, er... happy belated birthday, Luna. You're 14 now, right?"

"Yes, I'm 14. The same age as you, until July 31st."

"Oh crud, so I didn't know your birthday but you knew mine?"

"Hermione mentioned it in passing, once."

"Wow, I feel like a bad friend."

"Don't say that, Iliana. I don't like it when anyone bullies my friends, even when it's themselves they're doing it to, okay? You've got at least five different lives to juggle, it's only natural you'd forget or overlook a few things."

Iliana blushed. "Er, sorry, Luna."

Luna gently pinched Iliana's cheeks with a smile on her face. "You're forgiven, silly."

Their feet touched ground, then. Before they could get blown away again, Luna canceled the charms and they were back to their normal weight.

When they got to The Three Broomsticks, a rather worried looking McGonagall spotted them and suddenly became more cross than worried.

"Took you long enough. Where were you two?"

Iliana looked at Luna, who smiled and nodded at her.

"We were on top of this tall hill with an oak tree on it, on the outskirts of the village."

McGonagall blushed deep red, which made the two girls giggle. "You were on Makeout Point? Doing what, dare I ask?"

"Oh it has a name?" Luna said, interested. "I just knew it was a nice place to look at the village."

"Yeah, that's all we were doing, was looking at the scenery," said an embarrassed Iliana.

"Yes, it's called Makeout Point. I'm just rather surprised you were up there. Nobody's been there in decades, to my knowledge. A few too many people got hurt climbing up or back down again, it was banned for a decade, and strictly enforced enough that it's long since been forgotten."

"We were just leaning against the tree, taking in the sights. We didn't do anything else. Er, except fall asleep, that is."

"I believe you, Miss Potter. By the way, if you were all the way up there, how'd you get back so quickly? I was up there once in my youth, so I know it takes at least 20 minutes to climb down."

"We floated down. A couple featherlight charms from Luna, we jumped, and floated down."

"Really? Impressive spell-work, Miss Lovegood. Ten points to Ravenclaw. Well, come along before we miss dinner."

"We weren't out of bounds up there, were we?"

McGonagall paused, thinking. "No. The ban was never actually made official, so it's not in any rule books anywhere. Just be careful, try not to get hurt, and don't stay up there so late next time."

"Understood, Professor."

As they walked back up to the castle, they explained how Luna had kept them from being blown away by the wind, to which McGonagall merely nodded. Then Iliana and Luna talked with each other while McGonagall pretended she couldn't hear them.

"Sorry we ended up spending most of the day asleep, Luna."

"I had a lovely time, and that's what counts. What about you?"

"I had a wonderful time as well, Luna."

They were passing through the gates of the school when Iliana leaned close to Luna's ear to whisper something to her. "If you go over to the Fat Lady's portrait after dinner, I think I can whip you up a belated birthday party. Then you can stay past curfew, and I'll sneak you back to Ravenclaw under my invisibility cloak. Between that and the Marauder's Map, we probably won't get caught. How does that sound?"

"Oooh," Luna whispered back. "A birthday party? Well I suppose since it's not really my birthday anymore, it would be an un-birthday party. Sounds fun!"

"So you've read Lewis Carroll, I take it?" Iliana said aloud.

"Oh yes. I'm most fond of his Jabberwocky poem."

Iliana laughed. "Doesn't surprise me at all, Luna."

# _**Zoey, I believe we have a theme for our party, now.**_ #

 _Excellent, because we're all mad here! NO ROOM! NO ROOM!_

After dinner, sure enough, Zoey had enlisted the house elves to move away the furniture in the Griffindor common room and replace it with several tables in a row, with a great many chairs along them. The tables had tablecloths on them in lurid designs of purple Mad Hatter hats and Cheshire Cat grins, and the un-birthday feast was a grand tea-party complete with cakes, biscuits, pies, and fairy bread (that thankfully was NOT made of real fairies). Zoey was dressed as the Mad Hatter, of course, and costumed Luna as the March Hare (by her request), Hermione as Alice, Ron as the Mock Turtle, Fred and George as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, Dean was the Dormouse, and the rest just came as they were.

For the first 10 or 15 minutes or so, Zoey, Dean, Luna, Hermione, Fred and George, and a couple others who knew the book acted out part of the Mad Tea-Party scene, which confused most of the others but amused many of them anyway. Then with that out of the way, it was time for Luna's un-birthday cake. It was a double-layer chocolate cake with chocolate frosting with the words 'Happy Un-Birthday, Luna!' written on it. Zoey had transformed fourteen candles into 'Alice in Wonderland' character candles and put them on the cake, lighting them with her wand. Then Zoey and Hermione and Dean started singing 'The Un-Birthday Song,' the others joining in as they got the feel for the song, at the end of which Luna blew out the candles, or tried to. Zoey had made them into trick candles.

"If birthday candles blow out, un-birthday candles don't, of course!" Zoey said in a reasonable sort of tone.

Luna took her wand to the candles, and somehow their fires seemed to be sucked away through a pinhole from within.

"If you blow birthday candles _out_ ," Luna explained calmly at their incredulous looks, "then it seems reasonable for _un-birthday_ candles to be blown _in_."

Zoey burst out laughing at this display of Ravenclaw wit, starting off a chain reaction. When everyone settled down somewhat, the cake started to get doled out.

They spent the rest of the time eating and drinking and celebrating, Zoey occasionally shouting "No room! No room!" at which point they would rotate places around the table like a game of musical chairs. And adding her own weird bit of flair to the proceedings, Zoey brewed up tea in a very large teacup, ladling it into very small teapots, from which everyone had to drink their tea unless they could convince her to change theirs into a cup, but of course Zoey was using Mad Hatter logic, so such discussions were frustrating yet amusing. However, she always ended up changing their teapots into cups in the end anyway, while stubbornly drinking her own tea from her own tiny teapot.

It was nearly midnight before the un-birthday party wound down, the house elves cleaning up and putting things back how they were before. So Zoey switched back to Iliana so the redhead could escort Luna back to Ravenclaw tower.

The entrance to the Ravenclaw dorm rooms was, of course, an eagle-head door knocker that asked riddles. The riddle it asked them this time was "My thunder comes before the lightning; my lightning comes before the clouds. My rain dries everything it touches. What am I?"

Iliana stared at the Eagle-head in confusion, then at Luna. Luna was looking thoughtful.

"Hmm... that's a tough one. Hold on..." she stood there for over a minute, Iliana getting more nervous by the second, shifting around anxiously and looking back at the Marauder's Map every few seconds, since they'd had to expose their heads to activate the knocker. Luna kept trying to work out the riddle, but Iliana heard a noise down the hall and lost patience.

"A thunderstorm in a time reversal!" she blurted out in panic.

"Well reasoned," the knocker said, the door opening.

"Aha!" Luna said as she went in. "A volcano!"

"Correct," said the knocker.

"G'night, Luna, see you tomorrow."

"You too, Iliana. Thanks for the lovely time today."

"You're welcome. You too. 'night!"

Iliana put the invisibility cloak on again hurriedly as Luna closed the door into the Ravenclaw dorms behind her, then headed back to her room, not relaxing until she got back inside. How their secret hiding sleepwalker could sneak out so frequently without massive anxiety strong enough to wake up the whole collective baffled her. But soon enough, she was back in bed and drifting off to sleep.

The next morning, they felt weird before they'd even started to wake. Their eyes opened, and they started groggily trying to figure out why they felt so weird. The first thing they realized was that Tier was the one driving. He opened his mouth to talk, and found he was having his usual difficulty talking.

He reached up to grab the body's hair, expecting Adira's or Iliana's hair, and finding short hair instead. Much too short to be from anyone but maybe Chandra. Curious, he got up and went over to the mirror.

Tier blinked at his reflection. It was a blast from the past: it was the form he'd changed to that one time they'd gotten stuck as a hybrid between himself and Iliana, once the hybridization had faded and they'd been left as Tier. He tried going back In, and found he couldn't. Zoey tried as well, to no avail. They were stuck. Tier sighed with resignation and went down to breakfast.

When he sat down at the Griffindor table, Hermione and Ron didn't immediately recognize him.

"Hey, who said you could- wait, who are you? You look familiar," Ron said.

"Tyair," Tier said, mangling his own name.

"Woah, I recognize you now. Man, that was a long time ago. Wasn't that form from back in second year?"

Tier nodded.

"Oh wow, and Iliana was gonna hang out with Luna again."

Tier nodded, more slowly, his eyes wider. It gave a distinct feeling of being sarcastic.

"What about Zoey?" Hermione asked.

He grunted.

"Oh, right. Of course you already tried that. Well, Luna will probably be thrilled to meet you."

"Is it everyone who struggles to talk when you're Out?" Ron asked.

Tier nodded again, and started to eat.

"Hmm... I wonder why this happened to you."

Grabbing his wand, he conjured a parchment, then with a tap of his wand put words on it.

"'I have a suspicion, but nothing more,'" Ron read out. The rest of the parchment's text explained about the sleepwalker they thought existed.

"But why would this sleepwalker get you lot stuck like that? You said they left the note on the door the other day. Wouldn't doing this to you be a bit of a dead giveaway?"

Tier shrugged.

Luna came over then.

"Hello Ron, Hermione. Have either of you seen Iliana?"

Ron pointed at Tier, who paused his eating. "They woke up as an old form of Tier for some reason."

"Oh," she said, turning to Tier. "Hi there, Tier. It's very nice to meet you. I'm Luna Lovegood."

Tier bowed his head at her. He tapped the parchment with his wand again, getting her attention.

"'I am pleased to meet you as well, Luna. My condolences on Iliana being unavailable today.'"

"Oh that's alright, you can't help it. You and I can spend time together if you'd like. I understand you have difficulty talking, so I can help you with that."

Tier raised an eyebrow.

"My mother would sometimes go mute from stress, for minutes to days at a time. So she taught Daddy and I Wizarding English Sign Language of the UK, or WESLUK for short. I could teach it to you. My mother died years ago, but Daddy and I still use it in her memory."

Tier blinked wide-eyed at her, then bowed his head and torso at her. She smiled.

"We can start after breakfast, then, if you feel up to it."

"Essaylawnt," he said.

"Good," she said. "Hermione, would you please pass the bacon?"

Tier was stuck in that form for two weeks, right through nifflers with Hagrid and curse deflection in DADA. The others were still there, of course, and could help, but it was difficult having to function during school days without being able to talk properly. He managed by tying a blackboard to his chest, using his wand to change the words on it.

Luna was either a really good teacher or Tier was a fast learner or both, because by the end of the two weeks he was stuck like that, the two of them were able to have complete conversations in the wizarding sign language she was teaching him. In fact, on the day before the stuck period ended, Professor Flitwick pulled a box out of a filing cabinet and from it, the tiny man gave Tier a magical artifact that strapped to his hand and translated his sign language into speech.

'Thank you, Professor, this good gift. This of good use. Why it speak strange though? Something wrong with its speak.'

"Well, Mr. Potter, wizarding sign language doesn't have the same rules as English, since it is its own language. For one thing, it takes a lot of shortcuts. You don't sign out a lot of the smaller words like 'is,' 'be,' 'the,' and so on, because the language is difficult enough without adding unnecessary words to it. As long as your meaning is clear, that's what matters in sign languages. And because you are speaking a different language, after all, and the device is only capable of literal translations, the translation is going to sound peculiar as a result. Lastly, your vocabulary is still improving. The translation will improve as your vocabulary in your new language improves."

'I understand. Thank you Professor. A question though. It have off-thing? Don't know sign word. Thing turn it off? Want speak Moon L without all hear me. And how do names?'

"The off switch is also the on switch, right there. Then next to it is a volume knob. Some models can do multiple languages, but since most people here speak only English, those models weren't necessary. And you can program new words and names into it with your wand. Stay after class today and I'll show you how to do that."

Tier nodded. 'Will do, Professor.'

Once he could program new words and names into the device, Tier started coming up with signs for everyone he knew. Luna's sign he knew already, the sign for 'moon' followed by the letter L. For his own name, he decided on the sign for 'animal' followed by the sign for 'smart' and the letter T.

After dinner on that last night of being stuck, Tier, Ron, and Hermione went down to Hagrid's and he showed them the signs he'd programmed into it. For Ron, he took inspiration from Chandra and so Ron's name was basically 'knight' signed with his hand in the form for the letter R. Hermione's was 'brain' with his hand signing the letter H. Hagrid's sign used both hands doing the letter H to outline a beard. Dumbledore was just the sign for 'headmaster' using the letter D. And so on from there it went.

"Do you have names for the Others?" Hermione asked.

'Some I have. Others still not made. Al is just A plus L. Then this for Chandra,' he said. The sign he made for Chandra's name was 'moon' plus a C, signed with the left hand.

"Intrestin', Tier. But it's gettin' late, yeh lot. Yeh should git back up ter the castle."

At the end of two weeks, Adira woke up in her bed and her version of the body, Tier back inside where he likes it. But his sign language translator was still on her wrist; apparently he'd forgotten to take it off.

'Hello Adira. Good morning. Please leave device on. I want speak sometimes. You and others speak, please let me speak.'

"Fine, fine. But can we not have conversations aloud?"

 _{This is acceptable to me.}_ Tier said in their head.

She got up and got ready for her day.

They spent a relatively normal, for them, amount of time until the Easter holidays, the weirdest part of which was Zoey's birthday party for the Weasley Twins, which had gone until midnight and gotten McGonagall involved because of the noise. Contributing to the chaos, Zoey had managed somehow to smuggle some fire whiskey into the castle for the twins and others to drink, though none of the Potters had any of it themselves.

For Easter they took the Floo to Sirius's house, having Ron and Hermione over as well. The weekend was fun but ordinary for them, with the exception of waking up at noon on Sunday tired like they'd been partying all night, and some odd-looking dirt in the soles of their shoes.

"Sirius, do the wards keep a record of our comings and goings?" Adira asked as she walked into the kitchen where Sirius was cooking.

"At night they do, at least. Why?"

Adira told him briefly about their suspicions concerning 'the sleepwalker,' and about the dirt in their shoes.

Concerned, Sirius got up and went to the hearth in the drawing room, which was the location of the main controls for the wards. After a couple minutes checking them, he went still for a moment, then turned to Adira.

"Someone used your authorization, pup, to leave at midnight and come back at two am. See, there's a picture of them," he said, pointing.

Adira moved into position to see. The image was... her. A moving image, too. Only, it didn't move like her. Whoever was driving her body at the time moved with a grace and precision she'd certainly never possessed.

"What's more, pup, I have these wards set to alert me to anyone coming or going between the hours of 11 pm and 5 am, even with authorization. But the alarms never went off. Your sleepwalker has to be very skilled in both runes and arithmancy to get past the alarms. And here's another image, of them coming back."

This time, the person driving her body was carrying half a dozen old books tied together in a bundle with string, holding the bundle with one hand while deftly using their wand with the other to manipulate the wards again.

"Well I'd say we have a hole in our security that needs fixing, pup. That shouldn't be possible. In fact... I'm gonna fire-call Gringott's."

Sirius did just that, and half an hour later Fangslaughter and Benedict Snaggletooth were back, reviewing the logs.

"Merlin's bollocks!" Snaggletooth exclaimed, watching the footage. "How the ruddy hell did you _do_ that, Ms. Potter?"

"Blast if I know. None of us were in control at the time. It was the one we call the sleepwalker. Why? What's so weird about it?"

"These are the best wards money can buy, Ms. Potter. It would take a team of goblins working together to crack them so expertly, if they didn't already know their own wards. A powerful enough wizard could blast through them with enough time and effort, but it would set off an unholy racket in the process, and damage the house, giving you time to escape. I've never heard of a human being able to get past these alarms like that. It ought to be impossible."

"Why do you think it's impossible?" Sirius asked.

"Because the arithmancy needed to do this is beyond the capabilities of anyone I've ever heard of. Not saying it's merely difficult, I mean I don't see how any human could possibly do the maths fast enough to not make a mistake. Unless... do you see any Muggle computers or calculators in the footage, Snaggletooth?"

"No. She appears to be doing it all in her head. You can see her cocking her head, thinking."

"That's assuming," Adira said, "that the sleepwalker is even a girl. Or even _has_ a gender at all. They may just take on the form of whoever was last using the body. With all of us asleep, it would be child's play to do so."

"Will you look at that precision of movement?" Snaggletooth said. "Whoever that is has got a remarkable degree of control over their own movements. I wouldn't be surprised if they could walk a tightrope over a 30-foot drop and make it look easy."

 _ **Well now that the cat's out of the bag,**_ Al said, _**they're not going to be happy that they slipped up. The sleepwalker has been very carefully hiding from us for years, and now we have proof they exist.**_

"What books are those they're carring?" asked Sirius.

Fangslaughter zoomed in on the picture and gasped.

"Dark Arts books!" Snaggletooth said.

Adira looked, too. "They look like books about ritual magic to me."

"It's the same thing, girl. Ritual magic is a subset of the dark arts."

"All of it?"

"Pretty much. There are some things the goblins and the Ministry do that are pretty benign and can't be done any other way, but yeah, most ritual magic is classified as dark arts."

"Your sleepwalker must have gone to Knockturn Alley."

"Then we just have to ask around to find out who's seen me there recently."

Fangslaughter and Mr. Snaggletooth both laughed.

"What's funny?"

"First of all," Snaggletooth said, "nobody from Knockturn Alley is going to admit they saw anyone anywhere, nor admit they were there themselves. And secondly, given who you are, if your sleepwalker managed to go there and not be spotted, they must have changed their appearance. Had to have, or you'd probably be in a hag's belly now, or in a worse spot of bother even than that."

Fangslaughter was staring very hard at something on the footage.

"What is it?"

"The last book on their pile... they're not going to get much use out of it. I know that volume; the goblins of Gringott's have several copies. It's in an unbreakable cipher, lost to the ages. Must've cost them a fortune, though. Wasting your money, they are. Gringott's has had teams of arithmancers on the job of cracking that cipher for over 100 years and we've never gotten anywhere on it."

"What's in it?"

"Not sure. But it's rumored to be a lost volume of ritual magic. Said to involve human sacrifices. Dark stuff, that. Not sure I want to know why your sleepwalker is interested in that sort of thing."

Sirius looked very disapprovingly at Adira.

"What? I didn't do it. I don't know anything more about this sleepwalker than any of you do!"

"We need to find these books they brought home, and right-"

"Don't bother," Fangslaughter said.

"Why not?"

"Another bit here in the logs, shows an owl carrying a package was sent away from one of the bedroom windows a couple hours after your sleepwalker got back into the house. Clever, that. No idea where they sent the books to, or why. But they used your owl, Ms. Potter."

"Hedwig?"

"Yes. Your owl must have thought they were you."

"Moving like that?" Snaggletooth said. "No magical owl is stupid enough to miss that kind of difference."

"Yes, but the owl trusted them enough to take the package, didn't it?"

"There's some evidence," Adira said, "that the sleepwalker has been around since my first year in Hogwarts. So maybe they _earned_ Hedwig's trust."

"I suppose. I just hope it's not misplaced."

There wasn't much more that could be done at that point. The two Gringott's employees would need to go back and try to figure out how the sleepwalker got past the alarms twice before they could plug up the hole. In the meantime, Sirius was very worried, and kept talking about keeping an eye on them at all times.

"Well that'll be great, Sirius, up until it's time to go to school again. We have our own room, which is necessary. And even if we didn't, it seems this sleepwalker wasn't deterred by living in a dorm full of several other boys, and can sneak around Hogwarts without leaving much trace behind, and without getting caught."

"Damn, but you're right. In that case, I'm going to go tell Dumbledore about this. Until we know what that sleepwalker is up to, he should know as much as we do."

She nodded, standing there confused, thinking about this development. It made her feel... weird. Almost dirty. Someone was living in her head, a person who she knew little about, who was into the dark arts, doing Merlin knows what at night with her body. She didn't mind Al and the others, she knew them as well as she knew herself. But this sleepwalker... what were they up to? They weren't working for Voldemort, were they?

Aqua poked her head out of Adira's sleeve and looked at her.

 _'What bothers you, human?'_

Adira blinked at Aqua, and had a sudden inspiration. Aqua slept around their arms so much at night that if anyone knew something about the sleepwalker, it would be Aqua.

 _'We have found proof of another controlling our body at night, for years. We call them the sleepwalker. Have you met them?'_

Aqua looked very nervous at these words. _'I... well...'_

 _'What do you know? Tell me, Aqua! I demand to know, as your Mistress.'_

The snake drooped its head. _'The violent one told me not to tell. She told me to keep her secret.'_

 _'Violent one?'_ Adira asked. That didn't sound good. _'What did she threaten to do if you told? Come on, you kept your end of the bargain, we found out about her on our own, you won't be breaking your vow. And anyway, you already let slip it's a girl.'_

 _'Curses! The violent one will be angry now. She threatened to gut me and feed me to your owl, if I told.'_

 _'If she does that, I'll know she's not to be trusted. But don't worry about it, Hedwig knows not to hurt you. What does she do at night, this Violent One?'_

 _'She will gut me! She-'_

 _'Surely she knows it's not your fault. You weren't the one who gave her away. Now that we know, you need to tell us what she does!'_

 _'I cannot! I fear her. Much more than I fear you. Sorry. I am ending this conversation now,'_ Aqua said, slithering back into Adira's dress.

"Don't worry," Adira felt Chandra saying aloud to her. "There is another who can tell you more."

 _Who?_

 _~Me, of course.~_

In that moment, Sirius came back into the drawing room, with Dumbledore behind him.

"Sirius told me everything you know. It is most distressing to find out one of your Others is into the dark arts, we must-"

"Fear not, Silver Grandfather," Chandra said. "She is not evil. She merely does not agree that entire branches of learning should be kept secret and judged when there is use in them. And I trust her."

"You trust her?" Sirius said. "You trust this sleepwalker? Why? How? I thought none of you knew about her."

"Mother and I have been keeping her secrets and our silence. But now keeping these secrets would do more harm than good. I can feel her agreeing with me, angry as she is that she has slipped up."

"Hey, how come you can feel her and we can't?" Adira asked aloud.

"Because that is how she wishes it to be. Come, let us all sit down. I will tell the story from the beginning."

 **Endnotes:** Aha! Finally the sleepwalker is revealed! Finally we will learn her story! And of course, Iliana's and Luna's first date.

I find myself wondering what would happen to all of Rita Skeeter's mass if someone squashed her when she was in bug form. Not going to kill her off in this fic, just curious.

I don't know much sign language, just a few things in ASL (American Sign Language). But I've been around people using it enough to know how they come up with names, and to know some things about the structure of the language, as outlined in this chapter.

I want to note that if I ever forget, like Rowling did, about one of the birthdays of the Trio or Luna or other important friends again, just assume Zoey never forgets birthdays and always has something cool for all her friends' birthdays, including the Weasley Twins' birthday and the birthdays for Sirius and Remus. Heck, I can even see Zoey sending _Percy_ something for his birthday, too!

Also, I have become convinced, by powerful arguments (  What-are-some-of-your-Harry-Potter-theories/answer/Alexander-Antonin ), that Luna was meant to be autistic in canon. And it's a strong possibility that canon Hermione is autistic as well. I'll have to ask Rowling if I ever meet her in person. If anyone else reading this meets her in person, can you remember to ask her for me?

And last but not least: According to the word count of this story on and an online calculator that converts word count into pages, this story is just about 937 pages long at this point. Probably longer, given the spaces between paragraphs.

The reason I pointed this out is that I want some opinions on whether I should make this story "complete" on an AO3, and have subsequent chapters be in a new story or whatever they're called. After all, 1000 pages is a good long book, and most of the fanfic authors who write novel-length stories end up splitting their stories into at least two parts. I don't know what I would title the continuation yet if I do it. And if I did split it up, I'd obviously do it at the end of their fourth year rather than cutting it off mid-year. I don't know how many more chapters this fourth year will take, but I've already got 36 and 37 pretty much done, so probably at least three or four chapters past that, possibly more; after all, we still have Mr. Crouch's madness, the third task, the graveyard scene, and the immediate aftermath of that left to get to. So it'll end up being over 1000 pages long in the end.

Anyway, let me know your thoughts!


	36. The Sleepwalker's Arc

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 36"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-six: The Sleepwalker's Arc**

 **Notes:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much.

 _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _Zoey_ _, #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and between hashtags/pound signs**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__ _%_ _ _Mother AKA Avani Maznah, %__ _and_ _ _(The Sleepwalker.)__

All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

 **Part 1**

 **Or "Inside, In the Down-Below, Where Thought is Seeing and Seeing is The Out."**

 _ _ **As told by Chandra Rahasyamay.**__

It began in first year, after Christmas. Well truthfully, it began many years before that, when she would sneak out of Harry's cupboard at night while he and the Dursleys were sleeping to raid the kitchen because she was better at getting more food with fewer signs that the Dursleys might pick up on, but she didn't really know who she was, and they hadn't begun transforming yet, so really, it doesn't begin until first year after Christmas.

The gift of the invisibility cloak is what had triggered it. Of course she couldn't do anything about it while Harry was visiting the Mirror of Erised every night, nor when the nightmares it gave him started popping up, but once that was over, she took control of the sleeping body and got up. With her years of superior stealth skills, she retrieved the invisibility cloak and – quieter than a mouse – she sneaked out of the dorm room in her stocking feet, taking the form of whichever Potter had gone to bed that night.

That first night, when she opened the door to Griffindor Tower, the Fat Lady sleepily complained "Someone sneaking out again, happens every year, wish they'd let me sleep..." The hidden, unknown Potter girl – the sleepwalker as you call her – thought about this as she left, making a mental note to see if maybe she could figure out the schedule of the prefects, use that to her advantage. But that first time out, she went straight to the library.

It was nerve-wracking at first. Sneaking out at the Dursley household had been one thing; the Dursleys slept like logs, not waking up until morning. (Harry only thought they were more shallow sleepers because he wasn't much good at sneaking around. Not like her.) But sneaking around when there were teachers, Mr. Filch, and his clever cat hanging around, that was another thing entirely. She started at once to compile a list of possibilities for ways to improve her skills, assuming she didn't get caught this time. The cat could be bypassed by somehow getting the scent of one of her schoolmates' cats all over her. No, she corrected herself – then Mrs. Norris would think there was an invisible cat wandering the halls, so that was no good.

She didn't have a name yet. She hadn't found one yet that suited her, and she wanted to do this right. She wasn't going to rush into it; after all, she'd been nameless for years. She could afford to be patient. Not like the others. The others were all so fast and passionate. She envied them that. She also envied their visibility. But already there were murmurs that they weren't well thought of, words like "freak" going around. She didn't want to be a part of that if she could help it, even if it meant a life spent in shadows.

Since she was padding around in stocking feet, it was a lot easier to sneak around. Remaining calm and breathing as quietly as possible were also helping. And when a prefect came around the corner, far from panicking and bustling away, she fell into step a few feet behind him, so she wouldn't run into him if he stopped suddenly.

Percy Weasley, she soon realized; the prefect she'd been following was Percy Weasley. Good, this would be easier than she'd hoped; he was so full of himself that it made him loud. Years of being around the twins had likely helped make him loud even when he was trying to be quiet, just so he could find himself in the noise. Right now, for instance, she could've been wearing tap shoes and not been heard over the din his own shoes were making on the stone floor.

She didn't know his route, but followed anyway, keeping an eye out to try to figure out where she was. It was dark, though, so this was difficult. But Percy turned out to have a very well organized patrol route, very systematic, taking him through nearly every part of the castle in a very efficient manner. She would get to the library eventually, she knew.

When he passed teachers, he would stop and talk to report. Nobody showed any sign of suspicion that he had an invisible shadow, not even Professor Snape. But this didn't surprise her; Harry and the others wore their hearts on their sleeves. She had no proof that Snape was a telepath, but if he was, her thoughts were so quiet he couldn't detect them. That was no surprise to her; if she could hide her very existence from the other people in her brain with her, going under Snape's radar was child's play by comparison.

True invisibility wasn't just nobody being able to see you, it was being invisible to their other senses as well. Invisibility is a mindset, too. One can be visible to the eye and still be invisible if your mindset is right. With an invisible mindset, people would even walk around you to avoid running into you and not consciously realize they had done so or why.

Not content to just patrol the halls, Percy opened doors on occasion, too. Classroom doors and broom cupboard doors, mostly. It soon became clear why; half an hour into her shadowing him, he'd already caught two different couples snogging. One couple, a boy and a girl. Another couple, two boys.

She was hoping he would do the same at the library, and she was not disappointed. She sneaked in while it was open, so stealthily that he plainly didn't suspect a thing.

Looking around the room carefully, looking for a certain cat, she took stock of the darkened library as well. When she found no sign of Mrs. Norris, she looked for and soon found a small window. It was dirty, which is why Percy had opened the door, but it was so dark in the library compared to the hallway that she could see shadows when a teacher or prefect passed that window.

She did some maths in her head, starting from the time it had been when she'd set out, taking into account the time that had elapsed since then, the distance covered, the speed of Percy's pace, the average time it took him to converse with teachers, what she knew of the dimensions of the castle, her guess on what route he would take, average time it took him to deal with people he caught and hand them over to a teacher, an educated guess at how many times he'd have to do that, and of course the known habits of the castle's staircases and other changeable aspects, calculating a span of about an hour during which it was most likely Percy would pass the library again.

She was fairly confident in this figure. Harry had never been particularly good at maths, he'd always been astonished that he managed to pass maths classes, even if he always had to do worse than Dudley. But she knew them well; she had done his homework for him many nights, in his own hand, making enough believable mistakes to do just poorer than Dudley. How he'd never noticed this was beyond her, though.

Carefully she worked out where she was in the library, where the different sections were. This wasn't easy; she relied heavily on the others' knowledge of the library, which wasn't great, and this wasn't like a Muggle library. It had some order to it, but that order was different from a Muggle library. The librarians here had never even heard of Dewey, much less his decimal system. But most things seemed to be arranged by subject, more or less. Ms. Pince seemed to try to arrange these subject categories in alphabetical order, in more ways than one; alchemy came before arithmancy, at least. Then, too, the subjects were arranged in alphabetical order by author.

Even having figured out the system, that wasn't enough. The library was huge, a lot of the sections weren't well defined because books are seldom about just one subject, a lot of the authors were forgotten over the centuries, and more than half of the books weren't even written in any sort of modern English, or were written in hard-to-read archaic forms of English including Middle English and Old English, so it made sense. In fact, most of the books that were readable to a modern English reader were plainly from around Shakespeare's time or earlier.

Well first thing's first, then; she looked for the section with books about languages. Though many of these fascinated her, like books on Mermish and Gobbledygook, she passed those by in favor of books about Shakespearean-era English and Middle English. Marking where they'd been on the shelf so she could re-shelve them later, she tried a spell she'd heard about before, whispering the incantation in Harry's voice.

" _Gemino_."

Nothing happened. Either she needed more practice with the spell, or the book had a spell on it to prevent copying. Given this was a school, the second seemed likely. She made a mental note to plant a suggestion into the collective to make them ask Ms. Pince or Professor McGonagall about it later. In the meantime, she quietly accessed Zoey's powers and summoned a very long parchment and a self-inking dicta-quill into existence, one that wrote whatever she read, and carefully "read" the first book by just letting her eyes fly over the words without actually reading them. When she checked to see that this was working, she was pleased, but modified the quill to write in the smallest, most cramped writing she could get it to do, writing that was barely readable. She could always decompress the text later. She silenced the quill with another spell she'd read before, so the scratching wouldn't alert Mrs. Norris if the cat came wandering by, or any of the teachers.

Copying the text was so easy, just passing her eyes over it, that she thought while she did. She kept track of the time with Harry's watch (which he'd gotten at Diagon Alley last summer), kept updating the equation in her head about Percy's likely position in the castle (assuming nothing happened to disrupt that), set up a new equation to try to predict the coming of the shadows of various people passing the library, and also thought idly about ways to buy books from Flourish and Blotts while hiding these books from the others, or perhaps implanting suggestions to buy books into their shared memory.

She also noticed that none of the teachers were checking the library, except for Professor Snape. She saw plenty of shadows pass the dirty window out of the corner of her eye, but only he had opened the door to look in, obviously sensing nothing unusual. She wondered if it was just him and Percy who checked inside the library at first, but then Mr. Filch opened the door and actually came in all the way. She didn't react except to stop moving her eyes across the page and go into an even more invisible state of mind.

Filch wasn't content to just look around the dark room, possibly because the lantern he carried was messing with his night vision. He wandered around the room. Even keeping her mind silent like this, she was still tracking his movement and trying to discern a pattern to his wandering, which she did manage after he'd gotten about halfway through the room. He was meticulous, more so than Percy, and was going through every square inch of the room, his cat ahead of him, sniffing around. She calculated how long it would take him to get to her. She wasn't disappointed. She also didn't let him stress her; feeling stress was a surefire way to be sensed, and she was the pure avatar of invisibility right now.

Mrs. Norris looked faintly confused at the space she was occupying, but she didn't stand out. Likely because Ms. Pince never bothered to move any of the chairs, so her chair looked the same as all the others. Only the cat, who could smell her, was able to sense her. But she wasn't afraid; she had no reason to be. The worst anyone could do if they caught her was dock points and give them a detention. And given that she could easily fake being Harry, and could plant the memory into their collective memory in such a way that Harry wouldn't question why he'd been wandering the corridors at night, she wouldn't even be found out. So she just sat there, still as stone, her whole being casually mastering the art of being empty space.

The cat grew disinterested quickly, and kept on sniffing. This must have been usual behavior for her, because Mr. Filch didn't even ask her any questions, like he was known to do at times.

Within 15 minutes more, Filch and his cat were done. They left the library. She remained still for five more minutes just in case before continuing to copy the text.

Some time later, Percy opened the door and looked in, her prediction having gotten his appearance time more or less correct. She checked the time and plugged this new data into the equation as he left, and solved for a new estimate of Percy's next time around. Then she worked out how much sleep to let the others get, added it to her figures about Percy's route, and calculated when to head back. She had two options: either wait for his second reappearance after now, or else follow him along his first reappearance and use the time to study the school at night, and gain more information for her equations.

After a few minutes of thought, she decided on the latter, as more information was always good. She could use more information, especially, on the other prefects. So she sped up the rate of her book copying, going as fast through the pages as she could without forcing the dicta-quill to tear the parchment or set itself on fire. She wondered if there were any braille books in here; if there were, she could learn braille and try to copy two books at once. After all, their brain could handle multiple parallel processes, or they wouldn't be a collective of co-conscious entities. And since the others were asleep, all those parallel processing spaces were currently unoccupied.

In fact... if their brain was capable of generating multiple parallel conscious minds, that sort of implied that it was capable of generating useful but non-sentient constructs, a bit like computer programs. Especially since she already knew she had the capability to run modified temporary copies of the other Faces and write the memories of the copies to the originals. Programming a non-sentient construct to do even complex tasks would be child's play compared to that.

She experimented with this by making a construct that was as good at maths as she was, and copying her equations onto it. She checked its math every few minutes, finding it to be accurate. After half an hour, she shut down her own equations and let the construct – which she had decided to call 'Alpha' – take over those functions, freeing up more space in her own mind, which she used to think more about her plans and goals.

Her calculations were correct, and she finished copying the first book with enough time to put the books back and get into place to take advantage of Percy opening the door for her. Luckily, the book had been short. She would have to find a way to make the process faster; maybe she could design a dicta-quill that could automatically copy things from books. That way she could either copy multiple books at once, or pull out multiple copies and set each quill to a different section of the book.

Her equations turned out to be more accurate the second time Percy showed up, narrowing the window from an hour to just 20 minutes. Part of her had considered the possibility that another teacher, or Mr. Filch, could beat Percy to the door, but her equations said that wasn't very likely, at least given available data. A number of unusual things would have to happen to disrupt the patterns that much. And while that was always a risk in the wizarding world, she knew there wasn't anything to be gained by thinking too much about unlikely possibilities except to adapt. Everything that happened, after all, would be a useful data point.

Percy showed up within the projected window, and she casually ducked around him with such grace that he remained unperturbed by her passage. She stood at a spot that seemed likely to get her behind him at the right juncture, and waited. As predicted, she was able to fall into step behind him and begin shadowing him on his patrol route.

She learned a great deal of interesting things on this route. Some things she knew, like the location of Slytherin's dorms, but she also found the Hufflepuff dorm entrance and the entrance to the kitchens, as well as how to get into the kitchens, which Percy did because he was checking to make sure no students were creeping in there, even though that would be silly at night, since the house elves weren't there at night. They were, in fact, doing their cleaning. She made a note to herself to try to catch them at it. House elf numbers and nightly routines would be useful to know, as they could pop around the school from place to place with their own form of apparition, which could potentially be a point of chaos that might mess up her equations in the future.

There were also advantages to knowing where all the storage cupboards were in the school, as Percy made a point to open and inspect every single one of them, letting her see their contents. She didn't know what use the information was yet, but any information could prove useful in the future.

A flaw developed in her plan, though, as she followed Percy around the school. She realized she didn't know how long he had to patrol, and didn't know when he'd open Griffindor's portrait. But this was only a small flaw. She would detach from Percy's route in the area of the portrait, watch silently for a while to add more information to her equations, then she would sneak in when knew nobody would be around to see.

But then, another flaw showed up in the form of Peeves.

"Weeee," Peeves said, bouncing around a corridor. He was covered in ink, and was staining the walls with every bounce.

"Peeves!" Percy commanded in a quiet yet firm voice, "stop that this instant! Professor Dumbledore won't be too pleased you've made all this mess!"

"Oooh, prickly perfect prefect Percy pouncing perilously on poltergeist Peevesy, what fun! Weee!"

Peeves flew straight at Percy, who leaped back. His invisible shadow ducked to one side to avoid him, but Percy felt something and turned to look in her direction, which gave Peeves the opening he needed to splat Percy with a face-full of ink-drenched poltergeist. This, naturally, made him forget all about what he'd felt, as he shoved Peeves away and tried to get the ink off with his wand.

"There once was a prefect named Percy,

Who Peevesy had right at his mercy.

Got splattered in ink,

And couldn't well think,

Perhaps he should go to the nursie?"

And with that, Peeves continued bouncing around the hall, cackling madly the whole time, which meant Percy went off his normal route to find the nearest member of staff to report Peeves. This left her in something of a predicament; follow him on a new and chaotic route that might get her caught, or continue on her own. She thought just long enough to watch Percy leave the corridor, then decided to continue on by herself, since she was very close to the common room by now.

She managed to get to Griffindor tower without incident, and into the common room and back to bed, but it became clear she would have to ponder what to do in cases of chaos caused by Peeves; he was an X factor that could get her into a lot of trouble; trouble she wouldn't be able to predict, most likely.

While the others awoke, and for most of the day, she hid in the Basement out of reach of the others, with one lone tendril poking up to surreptitiously plug into the collective memory so she could keep track of what was going on and make useful observations, even in her sleep with the help of her constructs. She'd been doing this the whole time already of course, but it was especially useful now, for her equations. She was especially watchful for Peeves, as she needed tactics to counter the rambunctious poltergeist. And, of course, she was also making a plan of attack for how best to tackle the library.

During her next few nights, she didn't wander at all, but rather read the scroll containing the book she'd copied, and began the process of decompressing the script into something easier on the eyes. Knowing that conjured parchment lasted for years, she was using the dicta-quill to transcribe it onto pages of parchment that she clumsily bound together with holes and conjured twine. On the top of her list of things to get at the library was books about using magic to do your own book-binding, which she got on her next couple of trips to the library. As to hiding these books, that was easy; put it under the bed, in a parchment folder stuck to the bed-frame with a sticking charm, and implant a suggestion into the memory of the others that there wasn't any room to put stuff under the bed, so they wouldn't go looking down there.

During her next few nights wandering after that, she didn't even go to the library at all. Instead, she followed around different members of staff, and different prefects, to gather more information about their routes, their routines and habits, about Peeves, and of course about the school. On nights she didn't go out, she had begun to draft a very rough map of the school, based on the data she'd collected. Here, having the power to control the shared brain like a computer programmer who could jack right into the computer she was working on, she was able to have perfect recall memory by making her own memory core construct dedicated just to her, which she could hide in the Basement when she wasn't using it at night.

One of the things she'd noticed about Peeves during her nightly wanderings was that he seemed especially fond of targeting Percy, making a point to do so at least twice a week. She could understand why, too; Percy was such a stick in the mud, even to her observations, and so vocal about it, that he made an all too tempting target for the spirit of chaos haunting the school.

To her irritation, she found that library books were indeed spelled against copying, unless you ripped a page from it, in which case you could copy the page and put the original back with a _reparo_. But that was something she couldn't bring herself to do to a book.

Things went on like this for a while. She limited her nights out to a few nights a week, mostly on Friday and Saturday nights, so the others could get enough sleep. On her nights in, she only stayed up a few more hours doing work, again so the others could get enough sleep. These plans were occasionally sidelined when one of the others would stay up later than normal for one reason or another, but mostly she got into a comfortable pattern.

Her book-binding project was going nicely, once she learned how to conjure glue with her wand. The results were still sloppy, but she knew she'd get better over time. She did indeed find a book about braille, too, and an entire wing of the library full of braille books. She didn't even need to know how to read braille to copy it, she found, but she learned it anyway so she could read them later, at least well enough to transcribe them into regular writing later. The only issue there was that she had to conjure a simple machine to copy out the braille, until she learned to read it and was able to transcribe it to normal writing as she read it. She had to design a construct to assist her with this, though, since transcribing braille into regular writing took more processing power than her regular copying did. Still, her goal of copying two books at once was achieved.

She left finding Nicolas Flamel to the others. It would take her too long to learn to read the books in the alchemy section that weren't regular English, and the few regular English books in that section she'd checked had barely even mentioned Flamel, so she'd given up. It didn't really matter to her if the mystery got solved. After all, what was the point? It wasn't like they would ever be in a position to act on that information. She had been quite annoyed, later, to find out she was wrong. Bloody hyperactive daywalkers were going to get them killed if they weren't more careful! She decided she couldn't count on them not doing stupid stuff like that again, and vowed to help them if she could.

Spending most of the summer with the Weasleys had been an annoyance to her. The Weasleys were too shallow of sleepers for even her to risk coming out at night, especially since they had a ghoul in the attic that would be set off by the slightest things. Plus, there was no library there. Some books, mostly by someone named Gilderoy Lockhart (who sounded like a dim bulb to her), but no proper library. What kind of a house didn't have even a small library? Well, aside from the Dursleys, but it was a wonder any of them even knew how to read.

She couldn't even check if there was a library in the village of Ottery St. Catchpole, because they were expected to stay within the wards of the Burrow. And truth be told, even if there'd been otherwise ideal conditions for nighttime excursions, Iliana's nightmares made it risky to go anywhere at night. Sure, she could probably shove Iliana down into the Basement to sleep dreamlessly, but doing that at all might alert the others to her presence, and since there was no point to it, she decided against it. She would just have to be bored, it seemed.

All in all, she was very glad when the summer was over. She was able to plant some book suggestions to the others, making them think the idea was one of theirs, so she'd have a lot more things to read. She had been tempted to force the others to sleep and take over the body to copy books at the store, but between the high numbers of people there, the high likelihood that a bookstore would employ every kind of anti-copying spell available, and the risk of taking over control in the middle of the day, she decided against it. But at least they learned about owl-ordering, and had some checks with which to do so.

She was glad to see they were at least sensible enough to not steal Mr. Weasley's invisible flying car, even if she didn't like the Knight Bus one bit.

Their first night back at Hogwarts, she let them sleep. She didn't take over at night until that first Friday night, something she regretted later when Wood woke them up at dawn for quidditch practice. Thankfully, all she'd done that night was put her copied books back into place under the bed, which hadn't taken even an hour.

On her third night out, she was just grabbing the invisibility cloak when she heard a voice from inside her shirt.

 _'What is going on, human? I thought you were sleeping.'_

She froze, grinding Harry's teeth with fear and upset at this turn of events. She looked around at the other boys in their beds, who wouldn't hear her because she'd long since mastered the silencing charm, but still put her arm out toward Aqua's heated rock.

 _'I'm going out for something. Don't bring it it up at all later. Forget you were even disturbed.'_

 _'Fine, but you know I prefer sleeping next to you, you are so warm.'_

 _'Yeah well, it'll be hard to sleep when you're hanging around with me, right?'_

 _'An excellent point. Until tomorrow, then, human.'_

Relieved, she went about the rest of her night in peace.

For a couple weeks after that, she spent at least an hour every single night reading some of the books she'd covertly suggested to the others. It was during one of these nights that she first sensed another presence lurking down in the Basement, and cautiously and curiously peeked in to investigate.

Whoever was down there was even more skilled at hiding than she was. It took her a week of nearly constant searching during both night and day, and even then she had to poke and prod every available piece of the shared mental space, going over it all with a fine-toothed comb, to find any signs of the hidden other. But by the end of the week, she'd found not one, but _two_ other people hiding down here with her.

'Hello?' she asked when she finally cornered one of them. 'Who's there?'

What responded didn't do so with words, but with feelings and images. Neither of which made much sense to her. She tried again, and got similar results. But she knew from the shape of the other one that it was a Face, not a construct, and thus fully sentient, even if its thinking was... odd.

She did some more careful exploring, and discovered that this first of the two presences was at least as old as she was, but had spent all its time down here. It had never been up into the conscious mind at all, which explained why it didn't have words.

The other one, which soon moved in front of the first as though protecting it, was old as well, but this one had words.

 _% Hello there, Nameless One. I see you've found Me at last. %_

 _(Why are you capitalizing your pronouns?)_

 _% Because I am an avatar of Magic Itself. Which, if you think about it, makes me pretty much a Goddess. %_

 _(If you say so. Who's the other one behind you?)_

 _% He has no name, either. Neither do I, come to that. But I at least have words. %_

 _(You're protecting it? Is that right?)_

 _% Yes, I am protecting zeer. %_

 _(Zeer? What does that mean?)_

 _% It means zee hasn't decided on a gender yet. And since around here, 'their' is a collective pronoun, I used a genderless singular pronoun. %_

 _(Oh, okay. Are you zeer mother?)_

 _% I am an avatar of Magic Itself, and there is magic in all things, even Muggles, so I suppose that I am indeed zeer mother. %_

 _(Good. Can I call you Mother, then?)_

 _% I don't see why not. I'm technically your mother as well. %_

 _(Okay then, Mother.)_

 _% You have been awake, and using words, for years. And wandering the halls at night. Yet you don't have a name, or any other kind of calling. %_

 _(I don't want to rush into it just yet.)_

 _% I respect that. Anyway, I decided to let you find us because I wanted to ask you a favor. %_

 _(We just met, and you're already asking favors?)_

 _% Yes. Perhaps it's rude of me, but... well... the Potter collective is fated to have to fight the one known as Voldemort, and kill him. And this child, here, will have a role to play in that. I need zeer to have words, which will take at least a few trips up into the higher mind, before I can start training zeer. I would prefer to do this at night, to put off the time when zee will have to face the others. I want to minimize the risk of the others sensing zeer until zee is ready. Of course, the night is your time, not Mine. I can only go up there if called. And this child I protect is my path up there, the only way I can help them. So I am asking your permission to use a few of your nights, and to enlist your help as a guide, to show zeer around up there. What say thee? %_

 _(So they_ _ **are**_ _going to be doing more stupid things involving undead dark lords and dangerous adventures, then?)_

 _% Yes. %_

 _(Well in that case, fine. I will help. On the condition that you and your child are to keep my existence secret from the others, unless they discover my existence on their own.)_

 _% We have an accord. I swear on Myself that my child and I will keep your secret. %_

 _(Sounds good to me.)_

 _% May we start tonight? Or would you rather start another night? %_

 _(Might as well start tonight.)_

The one called Mother sent some feelings and images to the other one, and zee sent messages back. This went on for a few minutes until finally, the smaller one moved next to the sleepwalker and held onto her like a small child. Then the two of them surfaced, and suddenly they were cohabiting the body. Which, that night, happened to be Harry's. This was especially useful, as Harry now had glasses that could see out the back of his head.

The first night was pretty dull, aside from the fact she had to try to interpret wordless thoughts and feelings into some sort of sense, but by the end of the night the little genderless child had started to say a few words, though those words didn't make a lot of sense, and so zee was probably just babbling.

The process ended up taking a lot longer than Mother had anticipated. It took a whole two weeks for the little one to start speaking in sentences that made any sense at all, even with her plugging zeer into the collective memory. Zee didn't seem to absorb much of it beyond some of the language skills. And so she was faced with having to start puzzling out what zee was trying to say.

They were sneaking around at night when the small one said zeer first somewhat intelligible words, while they were walking behind Percy.

 _~Long square cavern of Inside, but in the Out, yet hard and covered in lines. Tall red-and-black warmth clicks loudly, and we glide in its wake, yet we do not click. We do not make click-like things of any calling.~_

 _(Er, what was that?)_

The little one thought a moment, then tried again.

 _~There is the Inside, but it is out in the Out. Not like the Not Inside that is usually Out. The Not Inside which burns our Seeing when it appears from its hiding suddenly. But it cannot be Inside, for it is Out. I have tried going out into the Inside Out, but the road is unmade.~_

 _(If I understand your meaning correctly, we call that darkness. That Inside Out, as you put it, is called darkness. When there's a lot of it, we say it's dark out. The Not Inside which burns is called light. And we see with eyes, so it's our eyes that get hurt by the light.)_

 _~Indeed? So we are in a dark square cavern, hard and full of lines?~_

 _(That square cavern with the lines is called a corridor, or a hall.)_

The little one laughed internally. She was thankful she had made an executive decision earlier to prevent zeer from being able to speak or control the body at all.

 _~We are in a dark corridor, following in the wake of the tall red-and-black warmth that clicks. Is there a calling for click-like things? The click-like things we are not making. Which to my hearing sometimes are stranger things, like thoughts, but sent through the Out.~_

 _(Er... if by 'tall red and black warmth that clicks' you mean Percy Weasley there and his noisy feet tapping on the stone, then I guess the click-like things in general are called sound, while the sounds like thoughts sent through the Out are called voices. And the voices are made of smaller bits called "words." Do you understand?)_

 _~We follow Percy Weasley with his noisy feet tapping on stone, but we do it while making no sounds of our own, all through a dark corridor. Are these callings correct?~_

 _(Yes. The stone, specifically, is what the floor beneath our feet and the walls of the corridor are made of.)_

 _~Walls? Floor?~_

 _(Walls are the sides of the corridor. Floor is the bottom. And the top is called the ceiling.)_

 _~Floor, walls, ceiling. Four hard things, pieces of the corridor, and the corridor is a piece of the Out?~_

 _(Yes. The world is very large. You're only seeing part of the castle, which is a tiny part of the world. "World" is what we call the Out.)_

 _~World. Walls and floor and ceiling are part of corridor, corridor is part of castle, castle is part of world, and world is the Out.~_

 _(Exactly.)_

A teacher passed by them, then.

 _~Percy Weasley we follow, and Percy Weasley we passed. How many Percy Weasley are there in world?~_

 _(Er, sorry. Percy Weasley is the name of the specific person in front of us. The person who passed us was Professor McGonagall. The plural for person is people.)_

 _~Ah. So people, like corridor, are part of world. Percy Weasley is one person, the loud red-and-black one. Professor McGonagall is the green person covered with wavy lines and has circles around zeer eyes.~_

She explained to him the concept of wrinkles as a segue to the concept of old age, and then the concept of glasses, and clothes, and that under their clothes, Percy and McGonagall were probably pink, like their faces. Which, of course, 'faces' was a whole other long explanation. Finally, though, she had covered most of the basics.

 _~Percy Weasley and Professor McGonagall are pink people, we see in their faces, but they cover their pink in other colors. McGonagall's circles are glasses, like our own, and like Percy's, to see the world.~_ He paused, then continued. _~If they are people, each with their own pink, what are we? We have only one pink.~_

This, of course, led her to have to explain 'bodies,' and that they were an unusual sort of people who lived several to one body, and of course she had to explain that not everyone was pink, and explain the other colors people could be.

 _~People can be colors other than pink? Wow! I wish I could be another color! I would be purple with green stripes and bright yellow hair. And my eyes would be every color in the rainbow!~_

 _(Well, if you end up like the others in the collective, the ones we've seen active during the day, you'll probably have your own version of the body. It changes, you see, depending on who is Out. But gonna have to disappoint you on one thing, kid: people don't come in colors like that. Skin comes in shades of pink or brown, or off-white, sometimes even black, and that's it. Eyes have a wider range of colors, as does hair, but stripes and spots and other designs are right out.)_

She felt disappointment and sadness from the little one, and tried to comfort zeer.

 _(Sorry, little one. That's just how it is. Of course, given that we're already breaking numerous rules just by existing, you could probably have stripes and rainbow eyes, but you'd stand out so badly that people would laugh and hurt your feelings.)_

Zee made a sensation like nodding, but was silent for a time. They passed several more people over the course of half an hour before zee spoke again.

 _~Some people have long hair and growths on the forward part of their body between their arms. Others have short hair and no growths. Is this like hair and skin color?~_

 _(A bit more complex than that. The ones with the growths, which are called breasts, are almost always going to be girls. The other ones are almost always going to be boys. There are other attributes they tend to have, hidden under their clothes. The collective memory can tell you more. And I said "almost always" because some people decide they were labeled wrong and try to make their body fit their own boy/girl identity.)_

She felt zeer plug into the collective memory and peruse it before returning to her.

 _~Both sound very interesting. Wait, our body is a boy?~_

 _(For the time being.)_

 _~I like it. But I wish to try it the other way. You may think of me as a boy for now.~_ Another pause from him, then, _~Which are you?~_

 _(I identify as a girl.)_

 _~What does your version of the body look like?~_

 _(I don't have one yet.)_

 _~So you are like me that way. Do you have a calling? A name?~_

 _(Not yet. I never needed one before.)_

 _~May I give you a name? Or would you rather Mother give you one?~_

 _(I'd rather pick one myself, but... well, it would be easier if we gave one another_ _ **something**_ _to call each other by, if not a name. Maybe some sort of label, like Mother has Mother.)_

 _~'Mother' is not her name?~_

 _(No, just her 'calling,' as you put it.)_

 _~Okay. Well if you would like a calling but not a name, I can pick one. You pick one for me first.~_

 _(Is 'little one' not enough?)_

 _~There may be_ _ **many**_ _Little Ones in world. I want my_ _ **own**_ _calling.~_

 _(Fine, I hereby call you...)_ she happened to glance out a window at the moon then, ( _how about 'Mysterious Moonlight,' or Moonlight for short?)_

 _~It is pleasing to the ear. And I shall call you... hmm... Highest Strength.~_

 _(Highest Strength? Well okay, that sounds good.)_

 _~Mother will be pleased that we both have callings now.~_

 _(That she will, I'm sure.)_

In the end, it took Moonlight several months to complete his preliminary training with Highest Strength, and by then he'd chosen an appearance and name for himself, going with an Indian look for his appearance, after having become transfixed by the Patil twins one day. And during one of their trips to the library, he had insisted on reading several books of names, finally finding one that meant the same thing as the calling she had given him: Chandra Rahasyamay. He'd grown on her over the months, and so she was touched that he'd liked the quick, random calling she'd given him so much as to go to that much trouble in naming himself after it.

Of course, he was still a sometimes-annoying little kid, and this showed true when he started calling her "Megan," a name that meant, among other things, "strong and capable." She didn't really like the sound of it, but it stuck, and she tolerated it for his sake.

When it was time for him to go back down to Mother and complete his training, she was sadder than she thought she'd be. They both cried, silently Inside, saying tearful farewells before Chandra went back into the Basement with Mother. And Megan, who had spent years alone and been fine with it all that time, suddenly knew what it meant to be lonely.

 **Part 2**

 **Or "May She Live Up To Her Calling and to Her Name, for The Lonely Time Has Come Upon Her."**

 **As told by Chandra Rahasyamay.**

 _% I am sorry, Megan, but we are very busy. It is nearly the Christmas holidays of their second year. I have the rest of this year and just the year after, with maybe a few more months into their fourth year, to prepare him. I should have begun his training as soon as we first heard the name Voldemort, but I had been hoping to keep him innocent a bit longer, which was a mistake. Every spare moment is important. I do feel your pain, literally, and I would love very much to send him back up to you – he does so miss his Auntie Megan – but I simply cannot. I'm sorry. You will need to be strong until he is ready. When he is ready, you and he can communicate all you wish. Until then, you need to leave us to our business. I hope you understand. %_

She had cried for hours after those words, even though she understood. He had a mission, and she didn't fit into that mission anymore. She had served her purpose in that already. But that didn't stop the tears, and it didn't stop her wallowing in sadness and loneliness for the next few months. Her projects on hold, her night-time wanderings stopped. And as time progressed, it became harder and harder to get out of the dorms anyway, because there were even more people roaming the halls than ever before, and their patterns were new and chaotic still.

Megan even tried to design a construct that could keep her company, but even though it was very convincing at first, it lacked a certain spark, and just felt like talking to a robot. Which, in a way, is exactly what it was. But she kept it anyway, and talked to it anyway, whenever the pressure of her loneliness was too great to bear.

She could have just gone and introduced herself to the others, of course, but she'd become so attuned to the confusion, distrust, and freaked-outness of most of the people in the school in regard to the collective that she knew more strongly than ever that she didn't want to be associated with them if she could help it.

But being the logical person she was, she didn't wallow forever, either. Even in the midst of her despair, she began to plan. Along with her other projects, which she went back to in order to distract herself, she tried to work out a way she could go out into the Out, as Chandra had called it, at night-time and yet still find a friend somehow.

Part of this project involved designing a physical form for herself. Being that Chandra called her Auntie Megan now, according to Mother anyway, she decided to go with a similar skin color to Mother, who had been a black woman the last time Megan had seen her. She put her hair into dreadlocks, like Mother, but colored them white instead of black because it was unusual but in a harmless way, and one that reminded her of Chandra's early desire to be interesting colors. For similar reasons, she went with bright amber eyes. Then, because she liked glasses, she made a copy of Harry's glasses by tapping into Zoey's abilities, and changed their color to silver, altering the shape into squarish frames with rounded edges.

Megan was satisfied with her work. But the name Chandra had given her... it felt too special to her to let it be marred by being spoken by outsiders, so she changed her name to Hypatia Ishanvi Megan Williams, except that she would never tell others about the 'Megan' part. It would be her secret name, known only to her, Mother, and Chandra.

But she wasn't done yet, no. Her regular personality was so hyper-logical, so careful, so silent that if she was going to make friends, it would get in the way of that. Luckily, she had a plan to deal with that. The constructed 'robot' personality she'd made to talk to when lonely, it had a bubbly personality, friendly. She could modify it to be able to mesh with her regular personality, and she would then appear to be a hybrid of the two personalities, able to take the construct – which she decided to call a Mask since it lacked the spark of the Faces – off and put it on at will. The fact that the Mask lacked its own spark was irrelevant; when she put it on, it would have _her_ spark.

She connected the Mask to her physical form as a final touch, and stood back to admire her work. The plan was nearing the end of phase one. Now all that was needed before she could do that was to decide which House to pick for phase two.

Hypatia's work was going well all summer long, despite many bouts of depression where she would mope all day long for a day or two and then be fine for days or a week or more before going into a slump again. But progress was progress. Which made what happened on the school train even worse.

Listening in on the others with one tendril while doing her work, she knew what was coming before they did. She tried bracing herself, she even disconnected the tendril and pulled out of all but her core memory, yet still, while the others inexplicably replayed a memory none of them should possibly be able to remember, of the night their parents died, Hypatia instead replayed the day Chandra left her to go to his training, and the day Mother had to refuse to let her visit him, opening those wounds all over again.

In a few weeks, though, she had recovered and was ready to move on with her plan.

After picking Ravenclaw, Hypatia went out one night to start phase two. It all began, this time, by pulling on her new physical form and bonding it to her mind, before taking over the body. By now, they were in their own room, it being third year. She'd been so wrapped up in her projects, including this one, that the last half of second year and the whole summer had flown by for her, and now they were several months into the third year, Halloween having already gone by. Her constructs had, of course, been doing a fair bit of the work of keeping track of things for her, and her own dedicated memory unit could tell her anything at all that had happened during that time, she just hadn't been paying much attention to any of it for a long time.

But now with a good reason to get back into focus, she reviewed the memories, then took over the sleeping body and forced her first ever change into her new form.

The difference was immediately apparent. Before, she'd always felt like some clever child hot-wiring a car that wasn't hers and taking it for a joyride, only this feeling didn't become known to her until she was, to extend the metaphor, sporting her own ride. She felt properly real now, rather than feeling like a bodiless computer program that had hijacked a human body.

Hypatia spent several minutes admiring herself in the mirror, taking her glasses off to make sure she really did need them (which she did) and putting them back on. Then she spent a few more minutes running her fingers along her skin just to revel in the sensation of it.

She looked 13, which was good, as that was how old they were. And, just as planned, her bangs – also in dreadlocks, but smaller – covered that distinctive scar. Just to be sure, she used a sticking charm on her bangs to keep them in place. Now nobody would know her true origins. She'd even picked a false surname, Williams. Hypatia Ishanvi Williams, she would be known as. 'Hypatia' because she loved the library, and Hypatia had been a famous female librarian long ago. 'Ishanvi' – an Indian name, like Chandra's, meaning 'goddess of knowledge.' And Williams had just been a random choice of surname.

 _'You are sneaking out at night again, human? Shall I assume- wait, who are you?'_

"That stupid snake again," she mumbled angrily at herself. _'You're already aware we're a load of different people, right?'_

 _'Yes, I am aware of that. Are you someone new?'_

 _'More or less. I'm the one who usually goes out at night. You'll keep the secret of my existence and my activities safe, right?'_

 _'I don't know. What's in it for me?'_

She growled softly, grinding her teeth. _'I won't gut you and feed the pieces to our owl.'_

 _'So violent. But you have my word, human. I know nothing of what goes on at night.'_

Satisfied, Hypatia put the invisibility cloak on and sneaked out of their bedroom and out of the dorms into the corridor. Sure, there was supposedly a killer on the loose, but he was after the others and wouldn't know who she was. What was more, she'd gotten used to sneaking around in a busier set of corridors, so that wasn't an issue. She left the Mask aside for now, though; its personality wasn't exactly conducive to stealth.

She had been intending to go to Ravenclaw to try to blend into their large numbers as a third year student, but it occurred to her on the way there that she stood out just a little too much for that to be believed. But she didn't want to change her appearance, either, so she changed tactics and decided to go to Hufflepuff instead, pretending to be a lost Ravenclaw. She could work out the details later.

Though her version of Harry's glasses were different, they were still Harry's glasses, so she was able to press a button to see out the back of her head, which was useful.

She made it down to the dungeons fine, but then Peeves came along, writing rude messages in yellow paint on the walls. One said 'The Chamberpot of Secrets has been emptied out the seventh floor window, beware of enemas in the air!' Which was very much out of date, as humor went, as that Chamber of Secrets stuff ended several months ago. Still, she felt something emanate from the Mask. She may not have been wearing it, but it was still connected to her, and it was thus still thinking and feeling using her spark.

What confused her, though, was that while she would've expected a laugh, a chuckle, or even a giggle, it had started to cry instead. This confused her, especially as it cried even more after reading the other, very rude, messages on the wall. But none of them looked like anything that should elicit tears. Of course, she could better understand what was going on if she put the Mask on. But that was a bad idea just now. So she merely watched it, and was shocked to find its expression was jovial despite the tears.

Peeves froze in mid-sentence and turned in her general direction.

"Oooh, Peevesy can sense someone invisible lurking about! Be you ghoulie or ghostie or wee student beastie?"

 _(Shit,)_ she thought, _(my stealth is compromised. Why? Is it the Mask? Blast it yes, it's the Mask. I'll have to add an off switch. It shouldn't_ _ **be**_ _on, but it_ _ **is**_ _.)_

Peeves turned around in midair so he was floating upside down, and grinned. "Oh well, maybe Filch can get something out of you," he said, puffing himself up to shout. Suddenly, she remembered a spell, and tried to shoot it at him silently, but it didn't work. His tongue moved just enough to alert him, however.

"Oooh, dirty trick that, dirty trick. No more Mister Nice Peevesy, then," he said, bouncing around the corridor. "STUDENT OUT OF BED! STUDENT OUT OF BED DOWN THE SLYTHERIN CORRIDOR! STUDENT OUT OF BED! OR PERHAPS IT'S SOMEONE BLACKER, A MORE SERIOUS INTRUDER?"

Sounds behind her told her someone was coming; that way was blocked off. So she did the first thing she could think of, checking her memory unit to see if Zoey knew the latest Slytherin password. It seemed the little troublemaker made it a point to be up to date on that one if she could, so Hypatia said the password, "Deathless," and jumped inside just in time.

But of course, she couldn't rest. Peeves might have seen the door open. Whether he'd cooperate with the teachers or not was another matter, but she couldn't take the risk, and shoved herself into the empty fireplace.

After many long minutes, however, nobody had come in, at least that she could hear; she couldn't see well from inside the fireplace. She'd faintly heard some talk outside, and Peeves laughing, but then there was nothing. She checked her watch, which said more than 10 minutes had passed. So she came out of the fireplace, only to find someone standing by the exit, looking very smug as ash fell from the invisibility cloak.

"So I was right, there _was_ someone invisible there," a drawling voice said, issuing from the white-blond boy who was smirking at her, his wand pointing in her direction. "Come out of the cloak, nice and slow now. No sudden movements. If I even _suspect_ you'll hex me, I'll hex you first."

"There's no need for that," she said.

His wand faltered a little. "A girl? So you're not Sirius Black, then?"

"No. I _am_ a black girl, though," she said, pulling the cloak off from her face.

"I see. And what House are you in? I know everyone in Slytherin already."

"Ravenclaw," she said. She took the cloak off the rest of the way. "I'm not here to spy on you or anything. I got caught in the hall by Peeves, and I just happened to know the password. Overheard it earlier."

"Yes, I heard. I was coming down the stairs to do a little reading before going back up to bed. I couldn't sleep. But why are _you_ roaming the halls of the castle?"

She shrugged. "Exploring. It's fascinating. Mostly I go to the library, but I wanted to check out the kitchens tonight."

"There's a mad killer on the loose. He's already broken in once."

"Yes, but he's after Potter, not me. I'm not even a Griffindor."

"I see. But he might use you somehow."

"He'd have to _see_ me first," she said, moving the cloak in her hand.

The blond boy finally stowed his wand. "A _real_ invisibility cloak, then? You must be very rich; even my father would balk at giving me one of those, and we're the Malfoys."

 _(Oh yes,)_ she thought, _(Draco Malfoy.)_

"Family heirloom," she explained. It was even the truth.

She still hadn't put the Mask on yet. Without it, she felt... flat. She was responding to the conversation very logically, but there was very little feeling in it, even she could tell. And if she was reading the signs properly, he was noticing. She tapped into their shared empathic gift for a moment, nearly wincing at the sudden input, but was able to confirm that hunch before turning off the empathic gift again.

So it came down to this: try to muddle through without social skills she'd never needed to develop, or put on the Mask – that imperfectly designed construct – and behave at least somewhat like a normal human being. At Draco's increasingly suspicious face, she made a snap decision and put it on.

If becoming a real person with her own body had been a head rush and a paradigm shift, putting on the Mask was even more so. She felt giddy, and then she felt herself relax into the new personality.

"So you gonna tell on me or not?" she asked, feeling a mix of impatience and worry.

Something about her change in body language seemed to put him at ease. She analyzed the difference with the logical part of her mind; before, her body language had been stiff, almost robotic, her body doing only what she told it to and nothing more. Now, however, it was loose, free, and energetic. There were little subconscious tics here and there that hadn't been there before. And once she fully relaxed, she'd have a bubbly personality, friendly.

"I haven't decided yet. But in the long tradition of Slytherin House, I think it might be best to _not_ tell on you, so that way you owe me. Yes, yes I think I'll do that."

"Uh-oh, owing a Slytherin? How much trouble am I in for that?"

He smirked at her. "You'll just have to wait and see."

"Alright. Hey, while I'm here, can I hang out for awhile? I wanna give the teachers and prefects some time to settle back to their usual routine before I head out again." (And of course, she couldn't calculate the best path or predict the patterns worth a cuss in all that chaos Peeves had caused, either.)

"I suppose so. Take a seat."

"What if someone else comes in, like you did?"

"If they do, I'll protect you. It's too good an opportunity to let slip by, a Ravenclaw owing me a favor. Besides, if they're truly worthy of Slytherin, they'll know to make you owe _them_ , too."

"Well okay, if you say so," she said, sitting down.

She was nervous, very much so. She watched as Draco sat down on the chair beside hers.

"Whatcha reading?" she asked, still nervous. For some reason, she felt she needed something to chew, but none of the current options felt right. Gum. She needed gum, but had none.

"A book of hexes Father gave me for my birthday. They're very good. Here, take a look at them," he said, handing her the book.

"I thought you were reading it. Besides, isn't information power?"

He laughed easily. "True. But I'm trying to cultivate a potentially fruitful relationship here. The more I give you, the more you owe me. And you can pay for my information with information of your own, you see? Ravenclaws are full of knowledge, right? Always seeking to know more?"

She nodded. "Yeah. Okay, sure thing."

She took the book from him and started to read it.

"Got any gum?" she asked.

"Sorry, I don't."

"Oh well." She turned to read again, but stopped because Draco spoke again.

"Oh hold on, I quite forgot in the heat of the moment to introduce myself properly," he said. "I'm Draco Malfoy."

He held out his hand, and she took it, shaking it.

"Nice to meetcha, Draco. I'm Hypatia. Hypatia Williams."

"Nice to meet you as well, Hypatia."

She smiled feebly and, not knowing what else to do, went back to reading the book.

"Er... do you think I could copy this? This is amazing."

"Hmm... I don't know. Do you have anything to give in trade?"

"Er, not on me. But if I brought you something, we could trade?"

"Depends on what you have."

"Well I've mostly been trying to figure out the library's system since I got here. Been learning Shakespeare's English and some Middle English, to expand the titles I can read. When I'm done with that, I hope to go on to Old English."

"Really? What about Latin? French? I know some of the books in the library are in those languages."

"I don't know either of those, no. I'd like to, though."

"Well... if you help me learn Middle English and Old English, neither of which I've learned yet, I can teach you Latin and French, and then we can start trading copies of books. The only problem being that library books can't be copied."

"Oh, but they _can_."

"They can? How?"

"If you use a dicta-quill set to write what your eyes see as you move across the page, you can copy a medium-length book in a few hours."

Draco's eyes went wide. "That works?"

"Yeah. I uh, kinda have a unique source for my dicta-quills, so I don't know if it works with regular ones or not, but with mine it works."

"Really? Well, I'm impressed. I thought I'd tried everything already. Of course, I can always have Father buy me any books I'm interested in, but it's so much more satisfying trying to beat the system."

"You're right. Here, let me show you how it works, I have one of them on me," she said, pulling a quill out of her robes, and summoning parchment.

He watched in fascination as she copied several pages of his book of hexes onto the roll of parchment, the quill going so fast he could scarcely believe it.

"Give me one of those dicta-quills of yours and teach me how to use it, and you can keep a copy of the book."

She grinned, and gave him the dicta-quill already in use. Draco used 'gemino' on the book, handing her the copy. She compared the two. Satisfied, she grinned again.

After that, the conversation meandered around, including some 'getting to know you' questions. Finally, they came around to a question she'd been dreading.

"So, what about the other Ravenclaws? Got any useful connections there?"

"Do you mean friends?"

"Yes, that too."

She sighed. "I don't think any of the other Ravenclaws even know I exist."

"What a shame. Well, that's their loss and my gain. Do you have any friends at home?"

"Um, no. I... are we already friends? If so, you're my only friend." She burst out laughing, even though she was miserable at this knowledge. Draco's eyes went wide again, looking confused.

Perhaps sensing something off about her laughter, or maybe reading the misery in her face, he said, "Are you alright?"

"No, sorry," she said before laughing again for a moment. "I've been lonely for so long, it hurts so much."

"Why are you laughing, then?"

 _(Because,)_ she thought, _(I must have wired this blasted thing backwards somehow. But I can scarcely tell you_ _ **that**_ _, now can I?)_

"I don't know," she said aloud. "I just laugh when I'm miserable."

"Well that's odd, but fascinating. I don't think I've heard of such a thing before."

"Me neither," she said, still laughing.

"Well you've got me now, Hypatia. I know we've only just met, but I find you to be more stimulating company than anyone here in Slytherin, so far, and this is my third year here. So I foresee a strong friendship between the two of us. At least, I hope so."

He put his hand on her arm gently, his body language saying he was ready to withdraw it if she wasn't alright with it. She felt a surge of joy, and began to weep.

"Ah, let me guess," he said, smiling, "you cry when you're happy, on top of laughing when you're sad?"

"Yes," she said, still crying.

"Well crying when you're happy makes a little more sense than laughing when you're sad, at least. I _have_ actually heard of _that_ , at least."

"Yeah, me too."

"We should find out if there's a name for this condition of yours. If there's a name, it would mean you weren't the only one with it."

She nodded. "I'd like that," she said, crying again.

So the two new friends went to work coming up with a plan to figure out how to tackle such an unusual problem, among other things, before both getting so tired that they agreed Hypatia had to go back to her own House.

And Mother, who was hiding behind Hypatia's eyes, watched all of this with a smile on Her face, glad that her plans were coming along nicely.

 _~Auntie Megan looks happy, Mother. I'm glad that you sent me to her to learn, even if it wasn't strictly necessary.~_

 _% Oh, it_ _ **was**_ _necessary, Chandra._ _For both of you. %_ "

She was having a problem; Draco was getting suspicious. They'd been working together on the nights they could manage to get together on for a week now, and he'd been asking others about her. His progress was hindered by the fact that he couldn't ask Griffindors, but not by much. Aside from incidents of Slytherins bullying people or where it came to Quidditch, Slytherins mostly got along reasonably well with most Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. It was Griffindor and Slytherin that were the big enemies, mainly because there was a perception that the two Houses were on opposite sides of the last war and its aftermath.

So yeah, he was asking around about her, and she'd stupidly chosen a distinctive enough appearance to raise some flags if nobody could tell him anything about her. The first time he questioned her on this, she shrugged non-nonchalantly and said that it was a big school. Inside, however, she was worried. Was her first friendship ever going to fall apart so soon?

Luckily, she came up with a simple plan, when next it came up. Tapping into Tier's shape-shifting, and making sure to not glow, she "revealed" that she was a metamorphmagus by morphing her hair to black and then back to white. There were enough black girls with black dreadlocks in the school she could reasonably blend in if she normally had black hair, after all.

"Hmm, I'd heard there was a metamorphmagus in school during my first year, but she was in Hufflepuff and graduated that year."

She shrugged again. "There's a new one, now."

"How come I haven't heard of another metamorphmagus in school?"

"Because you're the only one who knows."

He goggled at her. "Why's that? You could be really popular!"

She snorted derisively. "And have people be a fake friend just to make me do tricks for them? I think not. I'd rather have no friends than fake friends. I don't use my ability if I don't have to, and I sure as hell don't do tricks. Which is why I didn't tell you before. I wanted to see if you'd like me for me, rather than as an entertaining freak show." This was so close to the real truth that she pulled it off very convincingly.

Draco smirked, nodding. "Very clever. Damn, you should've been in Slytherin."

She sighed, turning the pages of her book. "I know. The Hat offered me Slytherin, but I didn't take it up on that. I wish now that I _had_."

"Yes, Slytherin is where you'll meet your _true_ friends. Even, it seems, if you're not in our House."

The two of them smiled. And with that, the friendship was saved. For now, anyway.

Ever since the others had gotten that magical planner with the note-saving page in the back, Hypatia had been playing around with it every few nights or so, trying to figure out all it could do. A month into the third year, she made a breakthrough with this, finding that the thing could store up to three different users with different passwords on it. So she started taking the planner with her and copying books into it, which really saved on parchment. Of course, magical items like this can always fail, so she would later transcribe it into proper books. She was getting better and better at binding books all the time, especially after finding several books about book-binding, one of which had animated illustrations in it.

On one of her visits to Slytherin to meet Draco, she nearly ran into Peeves again as she was about to turn a corner, but she pulled back, waited, and eventually Peeves wandered off somewhere else. She made a mental note to look into poltergeist repelling spells, or others that might be useful against him.

"Deathless," Hypatia said, entering Slytherin and looking around. Draco was already there, and turned to look at the opening door with a grin. She soon had the invisibility cloak off and-

 _'What is going on?'_ She froze, scared and angry that she'd forgotten to put that stupid grass snake back on its rock. How had she been so stupid? And she couldn't answer it, not without revealing she was a Parselmouth, which would be one incredible thing too many for Draco to accept.

Instead, she pretended to cough and pounded her chest near where the thing was coiled.

 _'Oh it's the violent night-comer, is it? Fine, I will be quiet and still. You won't even know I'm here.'_

"You alright, Hypatia?"

"Fine, just swallowed my own spit wrong."

"Oh, alright. Hey, can we go to the library tonight?"

Hypatia considered this. She could keep herself hidden, she knew, if she took the Mask off. But adding another human being to the equation was introducing a level of chaos that made predicting patterns and hiding difficult. Especially as she hadn't gone through the castle behind Percy in order to update her data; some of the prefects had graduated, and there were new ones to learn about. Then she wondered if there was an alternative.

"I dunno," she said to Draco. "I mean, I know how to get myself in and around there without being caught, and even then I've had a number of close calls. Adding someone else..."

"How do you do it, anyway? Even with the invisibility cloak, I don't see how you manage it. I mean, you almost got caught the first night we met, and I actually managed the Disillusionment Charm once and still nearly got caught so badly I didn't dare try again."

"There's an art to it. I suppose I could teach you. You know Percy Weasley?"

Draco sneered. "Yes, I know Weasel-bee. What about him?"

"Well he's like a human clock, very precise. His patterns are very predictable. In fact, what time is it? Ah. Come here," she said, Disillusioning him. "Also, I might seem a little odd tonight, but I have two different modes, and the mode I'm going into, which might seem odd, is Stealth Mode. Got it?"

"Got it."

She took her Mask off, knowing it would impede her, and invited Draco under the cloak.

"This is so cool," he said.

"First rule of sneaking around the castle, don't make noise. Don't talk. Breathe as quietly as you can. And take your shoes off before we go. Did you never notice I always come here in my stocking feet? Shoes make noise. Yes, good. Second, you're not wearing any cologne or a deodorant that has a smell, are you?"

"No. I showered before coming down tonight."

"Good. Now follow me. He'll be coming by in three minutes."

Draco followed her out the door, at her side. She led him to the opposite wall and used her hands on his abdomen to indicate they should flatten against the wall.

Three and a half minutes after leaving Slytherin, Percy Weasley turned into the corridor. Draco gasped ever so slightly in an impressed sort of way.

They waited another 30 seconds as Percy opened a door, looked around a bit, then closed it and walked past them. Hypatia pulled gently on Draco's arm and they fell into step behind Percy, silently following along behind the Head Boy in a rhythm Hypatia had long since mastered, and which Draco fell into easily enough. He was a fast learner, which was good.

It took them about half an hour to get to the library. Not as fast as going there directly, maybe, but a lot safer. They had a bit of a tricky time getting by Percy when he opened the library door, but managed it thanks to Hypatia's perfect timing and silent hand signals on Draco's arm. These were really simple, now, but she made a mental note to figure out a more complex system later.

Even when they were in the library, Hypatia put her finger to her lips to indicate he should remain silent. She led him along the stacks looking for any sign of Mrs. Norris or Filch. She didn't worry about Peeves; there must be a charm on the library to keep him out, which made sense, since he was so destructive.

On that note, she looked around for the section on magical creatures and looked for something about poltergeists.

"Can we talk at all yet?" Draco whispered silent as he could.

"As little as possible, preferably. We should learn some sort of silent communication for later. For now, look around at your leisure. But in... 34 minutes, you need to get into a corner or a chair and remain as still as a statue. Stay Disillusioned the whole time we're here."

"What? Why the corner?"

"Because that's when Filch and Mrs. Norris come in."

"Right," he said, nodding and wandering off to another section.

When she was sure he was out of earshot, she whispered in Parseltongue at Aqua, _'No hissing or any other noises, okay?'_

 _'I will try to sleep and be silent, Oh Violent One.'_

 _'Good.'_

She found some good books about poltergeists and copied as many important pages into her magical note-saving planner as she could under her own account. That done, she found Draco and poked her arm out of the invisibility cloak long enough to indicate it was time to be still. The two of them found different corners and stood stock still.

When Filch and Mrs. Norris came through, the cat spent a lot of extra time on Draco's corner, and she was trying to decide whether she should save him or leave him to his fate, when the cat gave up and moved on. Filch and his cat left the library, Hypatia waited another minute, then started moving again, brushing Draco to tell him he could relax and go back to his browsing.

"If the patterns remain the same, Professor Snape will be around in 40 minutes, but just avoid any place you can be seen from the doors, especially the entrance we came in, and be still and silent when the doors open."

"We're invisible, Hypatia."

"I'm reasonably certain Professor Snape can read minds. But I think it requires line-of-sight. Better safe than sorry."

"Okay. What about Weasel-bee?"

"It'll take him about 90 minutes to get back this way, and anyway you'll be able to hear him coming, he makes so much noise when he walks."

Using one of Hypatia's dicta-quills, Draco was copying things out of books of interest to himself, too. They worked in silence, the quills and the parchment she manifested both having been improved to have built-in silencing charms.

Draco got used to Hypatia's occasional directions, and was getting even better at remaining still. She was impressed by this. Especially since the second time Filch came through, Mrs. Norris pondered the corner he was in for a lot less time than the first time, and it was a different corner.

When Percy came by the library, Draco was tired enough that they packed up and followed him back to Slytherin. This was a little disappointing to her, because she'd wanted to stay at the library longer, but she needed to make sure Draco got back safe. She left him at the door to Slytherin and continued on behind Percy to head back to Griffindor (not that Draco knew _that_ ) _._ They'd said their farewells before leaving the library, so it was fine.

Draco and Hypatia worked on a lot of things during October, November, and December. He was teaching her French and Latin, which of the two, Latin was more useful to her because of its uses in spell incantations. Hypatia taught Draco Middle English, preferring to focus on teaching just one language at a time. But along with all that, she was also reading up on runes and so on. She'd meant this information to be used to design a form of her dicta-quills that didn't rely on Zoey's powers to be made and stay around, but an even better use for the info came along around Christmas.

Hypatia didn't like the Weasley Twins, those agents of chaos, but they went up a little in her estimation when they gave Harry the Marauder's Map. It was a very useful Map indeed, especially for Hypatia. With the Map, she could watch people at night from the safety of their bedroom and figure out the patterns of their movements around the school.

The Map had one worrying quality, though – it told everyone's legal names. No matter which one of them was Out, even Hypatia, the Map registered them as 'Harry Potter.' She supposed that made sense, but it was worrying. She really hoped this was the only map of its kind in existence, but also worried where the Map was getting its information. She suspected the information of coming from the school's wards. At least it meant she could see Sirius Black if he got into the school again, assuming she was looking at the Map at the time.

She had been very irritated when Al had his little blow-up about Sirius Black being a traitor and their godfather. He'd been shaking the room and breaking things with his uncontrolled magic. When one of these waves of uncontrolled power tripped a ward on some of the books she had under the bed, which meant the Sticking Charm had failed, she had enough. Taking inspiration from something she'd seen Mother do a couple times, she switched Al into 'unconscious' mode and dragged him down to the Basement, pushing Zoey Out in his stead.

Hypatia didn't bother changing out of Zoey's form as she put the books back where they belonged. She sighed, considering them. She'd have to find a better hiding place for them all, there were so many she was running out of room to stick them to the bed.

Not being happy about it, but not having any choice really, Hypatia went back to the bathtub and went to sleep so Zoey wouldn't wonder when and how she'd left the bathroom.

The next night, she considered the books again, and an idea struck her. She smacked her head in annoyance that she hadn't thought of it sooner. Checking to make sure that grass snake was on its rock first, she got her things together to go out. But she switched to Al's version of the body first because it was more useful for what she was planning.

She had been worried Myrtle would be a problem, but the ghost was in the actual bowl of her toilet when Hypatia got there. This was fortuitous; Hypatia merely used her wand to flush the toilet. Myrtle screamed, but apparently had no choice but to go out into the Black Lake. Not wasting any time, Hypatia opened the Chamber of Secrets. Casting a Featherlight Charm on herself first, she jumped, first cleaning the tunnel with her wand and closing the door behind her. She realized then she had no plan for avoiding Myrtle a second time, but she'd cross that bridge if she got to it.

Closing her eyes in case the basilisk was just hanging around, she realized she couldn't move without bumping into walls or tripping over gross bones. She used her wand to clean as much of it as she could, clearing a path through the bones when her wand wasn't up to the task of Vanishing them all.

To avoid bumping into walls at least, she started making regular clicks, attempting echolocation. There was a learning curve on this, it seemed, and she sometimes got barely any warning before running into something, but she thought she could learn it in time.

 _'Someone is down here with me,'_ the creepy voice of the basilisk said.

Thinking fast, she tapped into Al's personality and made a Mask version of it to wear. It was a rush job and wouldn't be great, but it should be adequate.

 _'Oh great King of Serpents, it is I, your humble ally. Just checking up on you.'_

 _'Ah yes, you again. I haven't seen you in some time.'_

 _'Yeah, been busy. School and all, you know.'_

 _'Yes, a student. Heir of the man who created me. Now that the other one is gone, anyway.'_

 _'Speaking of that, he's not completely gone. That was a copy of his memories or something. He's still banging about out there somewhere. Not in human form, though.'_

 _'Indeed? So he is in pieces, so as to remain mortal? But shouldn't that mean he died when I killed his anchor to this earth?'_

 _'Apparently not. As I said, he's still alive out there, last I heard. For some value of alive.'_

 _'He must have more than one anchor. Clever abomination, that one.'_

 _'Yeah, yeah, cool. But not what I'm here for. I was wondering something. The human who made this chamber, did he happen to leave a library behind down here?'_

 _'Yes, he did. The other one looted its treasures when he was in school. But since he was the Heir at the time, even though he bade me attack students, I did not make an issue of it.'_

 _'You sound like you didn't want to attack students. Is that right?'_

 _'Exactly. I was left here to guard the students from outside harm, not to_ _ **be**_ _the harm. But I was made to obey, so I obeyed. I did resist, but I was soooo very hungry, and he did not feed me. Which is why I switched to your side, human.'_

 _'Yeah, I remember. Kinda hard to forget, that day. Lots going on. Anyway, you like the food I've been having sent down for you?'_

 _'Yes. I am quite well sated, now. Thank you, human. Keep it up, and this shall be a very fruitful relationship indeed. If your enemy who kills students is indeed still out there, then when he builds himself a new body, this school may need my assistance against him.'_

 _'Cool. Hmm... would it be possible for you to give me a tour?'_

The basilisk paused, thinking. _'Yes, I suppose I can do that. Mind, there are parts of the chambers within that I cannot get into anymore, due to my great age and size. But I shall do my best.'_

 _'Cool. Show me to the library first. It may be empty, but I could use somewhere private to put my growing collection of books.'_

The snake nodded, and they began their tour. Hypatia was fascinated; there was a library about a fourth the size of the main Hogwarts library. She was amazed that Voldemort had managed to bring this many books out of the Chamber. But she supposed there were bags that were huge on the inside, that he could have smuggled them out with.

There was also a study with desk, chairs, and tables, among other things. And another room turned out to be a control room, with views of the rest of the chamber, and views of the school corridors and classrooms. There were even views of the common rooms, but not the dorms. Some views even showed the grounds of the castle, including one view out the front gates.

What was more, it was designed so that a parselmouth could direct the basilisk through the corridors and grounds of the castle without going along with it, creating a magical link with the great snake that was as good as sitting on its head. Best of all, the basilisk's eyes were magically blurred out on the view-screen to prevent its deadly gaze from hurting its master through whatever spells made this all possible.

It took her days to clean out the Chamber of Secrets to her satisfaction. But finally she began moving some of her less-frequently used books down there and put them on the shelves in the library.

One night while she was studying the Map in detail, including as much of the runework as she could uncover, Hypatia happened to be looking at the part of the Marauder's Map that had Ron Weasley in it, and she noticed something strange. There was someone else in Ron's bed, someone named Peter Pettigrew. She recognized that name. How could it be? It couldn't be a ghost, Ron would know if there was a ghost in his room. And it couldn't be a mistake, either; the Map was so well-made, an impressive feat of runic engineering, that she knew it couldn't lie.

Curious, she investigated while under the invisibility cloak, not yet changed from Harry-wait, no; _Adira_ was the name to use now-in case any of the boys woke up. She padded in quiet as a statue and took a closer look at Ron, noticing his pet rat Scabbers was in bed with him. She curled her nose; she didn't like rats. This one was even worse, looking sickly and neglecting his grooming, like a plague rat.

She looked between Scabbers and the name Peter Pettigrew on the Map. Yes, the placement was perfect. Illegal animagus? She contorted her face in disgust even more. If this was the same Peter Pettigrew that had supposedly been killed by Sirius Black, and even if it wasn't, whoever this was pretending to be a rat was one creepy individual.

Holding her gorge back, Hypatia sneaked back out the boys' dorm and over to her own room. She put away her stuff where the others had left it and set the body back to sleeping in its bed while she started working on planting a series of compulsions to watch Ron on the Map, with subtle notes added for when they finally spotted it.

The plan worked. The illegal animagus was unmasked, and Sirius Black's name was cleared. In time, he recovered some and took them into a flat he rented, which was like a house on the inside. Hypatia was pleased by this development; she'd always hated staying at the Weasley house. In Sirius's house, it was a mite tricky to wander at night, given his frequent nightmares and trips to his doggy bed at the foot of Adira's own bed. Still, the patterns soon became clear, and she was happy roaming through his library at night.

And then came the dreams, foretelling Chandra's return. Hypatia was excited, but Chandra was still doing some final studying and wouldn't officially be Out until at least Christmas, by Mother's estimate. Still, she was excited that she'd get to talk with him again within some months.

Of course, the vision of Voldemort soon after those dreams rather ruined this happiness. Eavesdropping on the vision/dream thing, Hypatia knew what was going on. Voldemort was getting his strength back, and would get his body back before the end of the school year. Maybe even by Christmas. It worried her. For her own sake, and for Chandra's, and Mother's. And the others, even though she still wanted nothing to do with them.

She and Draco kept up their correspondence over the summer. Before the year had ended, she'd told him she didn't have an owl, so they used his own to write letters back and forth. Since owls couldn't speak, his couldn't tell Draco where she lived. And even if it could, she always took the owl in a different room from their usual one, and always fully Out when she did, to minimize the chances of him finding out she'd lied to him for so long.

During the chaos after the Quidditch World Cup, her heart skipped a beat seeing Draco. She wished she could come Out and say hi, but that would be a bad idea. She watched him and listened, instead. She'd learned enough French by now she knew what he was saying to the Beauxbatons students. She made a mental note to have him teach her Italian and Spanish as well.

Hypatia was angry on Draco's behalf at the suggestion his parents were Death Eaters. She knew his father had been, but she also remembered one of their conversations about it. Draco played up his father being a former Death Eater for the power and prestige it afforded them both, but from the things he'd been saying over the past year, she suspected that both his parents were very much against Voldemort now, that they were as terrified as anyone about him coming back. They hadn't had a son for most of his reign of terror, and their attempts to make a spare were failing. They worried what would happen to their son if Voldemort ever returned. She suspected they were even making plans, though what those were she had no idea.

She was pleased to see Iliana master the Patronus Charm finally, even if it was a weird choice of spells to use against a human. A couple night after that, Hypatia tried the charm herself, and found that her own Patronus was a cuttlefish. That made a lot of sense to her.

When Al met Javier, she recognized him; other Slytherins occasionally came down to the common room when she and Draco were working there, and he was one of them. Draco hadn't liked him, as she recalled. But she didn't let Draco's thoughts on the boy drive her own. As she watched the boy and listened to him, she thought he reminded her a lot of her original personality, the one she was when the Mask came off. Only he was clearly passionate about several things. She supposed she was, too, but it never showed as much in her voice when she was Maskless.

Hypatia was very suspicious of the two deaths of Peter Pettigrew and Bellatrix LeStrange, both in one summer, especially since she could recall the vision of Voldemort perfectly. But all she had were suspicions.

Once they returned to the school, she set aside her suspicions and looked forward to more night-time outings. Something else in her favor was the fancy new trunk that was bigger on the inside and had several compartments, something she'd have to study in detail to see if she could hide her own stuff in there.

Hypatia made gagging noises in the safety of the Basement while Al got lovey with his boyfriend, and had to pull her tendril back because the whole thing grossed her out so much. Not that she cared about two boys being intimate one way or another, but one of those boys was basically her brother, from her point of view, and she didn't really see the appeal of snogging anyway. But more annoying than that, though, was the fact that she couldn't go out that night without risking waking Javier.

She'd been prepared to like Moody, but when he turned Draco into a ferret, she took an immediate dislike to the man. The fact he later did the three Unforgivable Curses in front of the students didn't help endear him to her at all. She even began to dislike Dumbledore for hiring the man in the first place.

When he cast the Imperius Curse on them – which she couldn't understand how he was getting away with, since the wards should be setting off alarm bells at all these Unforgivables – she had to resist going apoplectic with rage. Luckily for them, though, their unique condition made them immune to the spell. Still, when he later gave Neville a book that sounded very useful, about magical water plants of the Mediterranean, she later sneaked into Neville's room and copied it.

Worried about Moody's magical eye, she spent the first two months back refraining from shifting to her own form in case he spotted it somehow, since he could see through solid objects. It was a problem she needed to solve, and would require more information. Unfortunately, whenever she saw him on the Marauder's Map, he was always in his office; he seemed to sleep there, because he never moved. She was going to have to go out for more information. Luckily, this gave her a ready excuse for why she couldn't visit Draco, if she could ever find a way to get a message to him without that being spotted, too.

So, her second week back, she was roaming the halls behind members of staff, still in the body of whoever had been Out when they went to bed that night, in case Moody saw them. But for several weeks of wandering around like this, she never saw him even once.

Then, of course, came the day when she finally _did_ see him. He was stumping around the corridor, so loudly she realized he probably didn't patrol because of it. Plus, he was so paranoid that it probably wasn't safe to let him patrol.

As soon as she saw him, he froze and turned to look right at her. The prefect she was tailing thought he was trying to talk to her instead, but Hypatia knew better. His magical blue eye could see through invisibility cloaks! That ruined her plans immediately. She wouldn't be able to meet with Draco until she had a plan to deal with Moody's eye. Luckily for her, he was leaving at the end of the year.

Thankfully, he didn't tell on her. But he _did_ grin, a little, as though amused by how well she was hiding and sneaking around at night. He left without incident, but she was paranoid the whole way back to the Griffindor common room.

She tried for weeks to come up with a solution to the problem. She thought of Disillusionment Charms, but that probably wouldn't work for the same reasons the Invisibility Cloak didn't. Become an animagus? But he might notice that, or notice her attempts, and trace her back to the others. Of course, there was always the possibility he'd keep her secret, but information was power, and she didn't want to give that kind of power to someone she didn't like.

And then of course was the Triwizard Tournament. Al's flight from the school and subsequent splinching, which had infuriated her. And next, surprising even her, Chandra's sudden appearance. And he was all alone, the others in hiding.

"Are you Chandra Rahasyamay?" Dumbledore had said, and Hypatia had felt Chandra's confusion.

 _(You can do this,)_ she thought. But she didn't send it to Chandra. She had tried, of course, but Mother had told her it wasn't time yet. So she just watched, and listened to his thought processes, smiling at their familiarity. The images, jumbled up. The weird way of looking at the world. Something was not right, here. Where were his words?

But then he found them, straining himself the whole time. She felt the process of it, moving from images to rough sentences like _~Tall brightly-colored silver-haired circle-faced being with the living fire thing that makes soul-clicks,~_ to _~Silver-haired tall man with glasses over starry eyes and the friendship of the flaming song-bird,~_ to his eventual first words, "Silver Grandfather, with the fire-bird. The red and the gold. The silver and the blue. Starlight in the day."

She cried a little at this (her Mask's weird emotional affect now affecting her permanently). It was going to be _hilarious_ watching everyone try to figure out Chandra's weird speech patterns. She leaned back to enjoy the show, crying especially at Filch's response to the innocence of Chandra. It was like watching a very strange small child trying to adapt to being in a 14 year old body. She both laughed and cried, internally.

Hypatia didn't get to talk with Chandra at all until the first night after Al's return. Al went to sleep, but Chandra stayed awake, in such a way that it wouldn't interfere with Hypatia.

 _~Auntie Megan? Are you there, Auntie Megan?~_

 _(Yes, I'm here Chandra. It's good to see you again.)_

 _~Likewise, Auntie Megan. Ah, but I see you have a new calling. Shall I-~_

 _(No. Megan is fine, for you and me and Mother. I just... it's our special name. I don't want others using it.)_

 _~Understood. Oh, and you have chosen a form at last. And you made a friend. Excellent. I am much pleased by this. Why are you crying?~_

 _(I'm happy. It's the weirdest thing, this Mask I made, it must be wired wrong, and I haven't been able to fix it.)_

 _~You are unique. There is nothing Wrong about that.~_

 _(If you say so.)_

 _~Hmm... I see you are having issues. The one with the blue Eye of Sauron, his all-seeingness disturbs you. You have not been seeing your friend.~_

 _(No, I haven't. I wish I knew what to do.)_

 _~I can sing a song to hide you. Down here in the Down-Below with you, more of my training comes to me, more readily. It is like the difference between the moon in daylight and the moon at night.~_

 _(His eye sees through invisibility cloaks and Disillusionment Charms, Chandra.)_

 _~Yes, but I think he will not see through this. We can attempt it in my body, as proof of concept. I am certain I can walk right by him and he won't see us.~_

 _(Well, if you're sure, I guess it couldn't hurt.)_

They surfaced, Chandra getting up and putting the invisibility cloak on.

 _~Shall we check the Marauder's Map, Aunt Megan?~_

 _(No, there's no point. I think he's got it fooled somehow, it always shows him in his office. But I don't know for sure, I don't trust myself to take the Map with me.)_

 _~Understood.~_

Together they sneaked out of the room and down into the corridors of the school. As they began walking down to the common room, he began to sing a wordless song in their head. She smelled lavender for a moment, then it faded.

Getting into a routine, they followed behind Professor McGonagall on her patrol.

 _~Ah, this brings me back to when I thought she was another Percy Weasley. She of the green and the black, and the iron in her back.~_

 _(Me too, kiddo. Me too.)_

It took them awhile to find Moody. In the meantime, they passed right by Mrs. Norris, who didn't appear to smell them at all.

Moody turned out to be coming out of Snape's office for some reason. He grunted at an annoyed McGonagall and moved on. They saw his eye whiz past them, but it didn't slow down, and he gave no sign of seeing them.

Chandra waved under the cloak, but though he should have been able to see them, he didn't react as though he could.

 _(How are you doing that?)_

 _~It is a different sort of magic. It is ritual magic. It demands a cost, a sacrifice to work, but its powers are greater than wand magic.~_

 _(What did you sacrifice?)_

 _~I sacrificed our ability to transform, for two days' time. But other sacrifices could be made.~_

 _(Like what? I don't want to not be able to transform. I need to see Draco!)_

 _~Well... I have an idea. It would satisfy the terms of the ritual yet not inconvenience you to sacrifice, for instance, your ability to cast a Patronus for a time.~_

 _(And it only takes two days' worth of this to get past that eye of Moody's?)_

 _~I believe so. Your own experiences may differ, I do not know. But you could try.~_

 _(Are you going to be this much more knowledgeable and stuff every night?)_

 _~We are of the darkness, you and Mother and I. We come alive during it. I have a day mode and a night mode, both very different. But yes, I can accompany you at night, much more useful than I would be in the day.~_

 _(That sounds a bit like being a multiple within a multiple.)_

 _~There is a diamond of truth in the rough of those words, Aunt Megan. My night memories are very different from my day memories. I will likely not even remember this conversation, in the morning. But I will again when the night returns.~_

 _(Well in that case, we might as well go to the library, since we can't transform for another two days.)_

 _~Just like old times, Aunt Megan.~_

 _(Yes, just like old times, Chandra.)_

Endnotes: This was originally just some back-story I wrote for the sleepwalker, without intending it to be a chapter, but it was so good I had to make it a chapter.

Part 3 of The Sleepwalker's Arc will continue in the next chapter. This one was already very long.

Hypatia/Megan is another one with no resemblance to anyone in my own collective. In fact, the inspiration for Hypatia ("how about someone who sneaks out at night to visit the library?") goes to my friend Andrea.


	37. The Sleepwalker's Arc Continued

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 37"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-seven: The Sleepwalker's Arc Continued**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much.

 **Note 3:** I have different styles for the internal speech of _**Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _Zoey_ _, #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and between hashtags/pound signs**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__ _%_ _ _Mother AKA Avani Maznah, %__ and __(Hypatia/Megan.)__

 **Note 4:** All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!

 **Note 5:** Yes, Chandra is speaking of himself in the third person in these chapters. The Sleepwalker's Arc chapters were written in third person. It was easier to keep it that way than to try changing them to first person or whatever.

 ***FAYANORA***

 **Part 3**

 **Or "Searching In The Darkness For Ways To Help The Light."**

 **As told by Chandra Rahasyamay.**

Once Chandra had taught Hypatia how to activate the simple ritual to get past Moody, and once she could transform again, she went right to Slytherin's common room one night. He wasn't in there, probably because she'd been gone so long, but she sneaked around the boys' dorms and found his dorm, finding him reading in bed.

Naturally, he looked at the door opening on its own. Getting his wand out, he hissed, "Identify yourself!"

"It's me!"

"Hypatia? Where have you been all this time? The First Task of the Triwizard Tournament is just a week away!"

"Sorry. But Moody's got this eye that can see through solid objects, even invisibility cloaks, and I didn't want to get caught by him. Come on, let's talk downstairs."

"Fine, alright. But I'm still cross with you, you never even sent me any letters, once we got back to school."

"Yeah, well, I've been having trouble with my dorm mates. They hide my stuff, it's infuriating. By the time I find it again, I've quite forgotten anything but my anger."

They went downstairs into the common room before Draco spoke again.

"Yes, and naturally you couldn't just walk up to me in the Great Hall."

"I'm sorry! I really, truly am. It's hurt so much. You're still my only friend, Draco. I've been lonely this whole time, if I could've gotten hold of you, I would have." She started to laugh, as she always did when she was miserable.

"Okay okay, stop laughing, I'm sorry I was so cross with you. It's just... why can't you just talk to me in the halls like a normal person?"

She hung her head. "It's just... no, I'm sorry, I don't have an explanation. I just can't. It's nothing personal against you." She took his hand in hers and squeezed it. "If I could come up to you in the hall during the day, I would. If I could meet you over the weekend during the day, I would. In a heartbeat I would, if I could. But I can't."

Something strange went across his face briefly, but it passed as he grew thoughtful.

"I'll respect your privacy, then, Hypatia. But if there's anything I can do to help you, let me know, okay?"

"I will. Thank you for understanding."

"Well, I don't understand, really, but I'm a Slytherin. We all have our secrets. I'm still your friend, though, just so you know."

She smiled, and they went back to work as though no time had passed since last year.

Toward the end of their time together that night, though, Draco asked, "Oh yeah, I almost forgot. How did you get past Moody's eye, finally?"

"I got desperate, and swore that Magic Itself could have some of my magic for two days if I could just get past Moody's eye. I felt a tingle, lost my ability to cast Disillusionment Charms, and suddenly I knew I could do it. I went out, walked right by him and he didn't see, even when I waved at him under the cloak. Which was a neat trick because I almost got caught by him once before. I know he can see through the cloak normally. But once I did that, he just couldn't see me anymore."

"That sounds like ritual magic." He smirked at her. "That's technically dark magic, that is. You _really_ should have been in Slytherin."

"You mean there's more kinds of magic than accidental magic and wand magic?"

"Oh yes. There's wandless magic, which is right on the edge between light and dark magic due to being much harder to control, and only really accepted because it was hard to make a case against it. Then of course ritual magic, which always has a cost. You have to give something up to gain something of equal or lesser value, in ritual magic. It's a form of magic that can be highly unpredictable, very persnickety. The smallest mistakes can be dangerous, which is why it's mostly considered dark magic. You got lucky, for your first time, only losing Disillusionment Charms. You could've ended up being unable to do magic at all for a day or two instead."

"Wow. You sound like you know something about them."

"I might have some resources that could benefit you, in that regard. With your arithmancy skills, I'll bet you could improve on many of the rituals I know about. Tricky though ritual magic may be, it still follows rules and can be defined arithmantically."

"Sounds like a project for next time."

"Yes. Speaking of, when can you meet again?"

"I'm not sure. It depends on when my dorm mates go to bed, and how deep they sleep. I'll be back as soon as I can, though."

"I'll go back to waiting for you in the common room, then."

"Thanks," she said, and kissed him on the cheek quickly before pulling on the cloak and heading out into the corridors.

They did indeed make a project of studying ritual magic. Draco got some books from his father via their owl, and the two friends studied these books every night they were able to, in addition to the other projects they had with one another.

"This book here is especially interesting, I think. Its payments are a little more troubling than sacrificing bits of your magic, but the payouts are greater."

"What kind of payments?"

"Mostly pain. You invoke one of these rituals, and you might have to deal with a migraine for a day, or a throbbing pain in your leg, all the way up to the heavier rituals that can give you arthritis for the rest of your life."

"Arthritis? I don't know what could possibly be worth that sort of payment, Draco."

"Well I haven't read the book yet, so neither do I. But let's take an example. Hmm... not that one, not that one... ah! Here's one. This ritual here costs a bad hand cramp in your non-dominant hand for a day, and with it you can increase your reaction speed in duels for the same duration."

"Hardly necessary in my case, but it's a worthy example."

"Here's another example, a ritual curse. Block someone's magic completely for a day, the cost is pain in your arms for the day."

"Sounds like a poor choice of payment. You cripple yourself for a day just to do the same to someone else? Let me see that one. I want to study that one. There might be a way to improve on it."

"In ritual magic, Hypatia, you have to sacrifice something to get something of equal or lesser value. The cost and the reward are often directly related. Whatever you want to happen to another, you have to do to yourself, or do something similar instead. Or, in some of the darker rituals, you have to do it to someone else, but that has effects on your mind."

"Yeah, I figured that out already. It's kind of obvious. I give up the Disillusionment Charm to gain being hidden from Moody's magical eye. You hurt your enemy's hands by hurting your own. But I think there's more to it than that. You mentioned one possible cost I could've had to pay for the same protection from Moody was losing my magic for a day or more. That suggests it's not always related. That it's just a balancing act; give yourself some sort of strength by willingly taking on a weakness in its place. But no... the maths aren't adding up."

"What do you mean?" Draco asked.

"I mean that sacrificing your magic for a day is too high a cost, arithmantically, for that small a reward. Giving up all your ability to defend yourself for a whole day or more just to hide from a magical eye? That's like paying a galleon for something worth a sickle, and getting no change back."

"Yes, it is. But that sort of thing only happens if you screw up the ritual. It's a punishment for making a mistake."

"You make it sound like some god is to blame. But it's just maths and physics. Magic is a part of how the universe works, and since it can be described arithmantically, that means it has rules, as you said. The rules don't just change because you mess up. That extra energy when a ritual is messed up goes _somewhere._ I just don't know where yet."

"Wherever it goes probably depends on how you've messed up."

Hypatia picked a small ritual out of another book and started working out the maths on it, in her head. Within a few minutes, she had it analyzed enough to theorize some ways it might go wrong. But she needed more data.

"I'm going to purposefully mess this one up to see what happens."

"What? Why? You shouldn't do that, it's dangerous!"

Tapping a parchment with her wand, she filled it with her analysis of the ritual. "As you can see here, I have it analyzed enough I think I can guess how it can go wrong. To come up with a hypothesis about where the energy of a botched ritual goes, I need more data. I need to botch one on purpose and see what happens. This one is already analyzed, with predictions. It's safe."

"Wait, did you do all those maths in your head?"

"Yes. It was a trivial analysis."

" _Trivial?_ I don't even know what half of these symbols _mean_!"

"I've always been good at maths. The sort of maths they teach in Muggle schools far outstrip the reach of what's taught in the wizarding world."

"Wait, you were in a Muggle school? When? Are you a Mud—er, a Muggle-born?"

"I'm a half-blood. I was raised in the Muggle world. My parents wanted me to get a good education. You had tutors for writing and maths and stuff, right?"

"Yes."

"Well in the Muggle world, at least in Britain and other Western nations, education is free for all children. Well, the government pays for it with taxes."

"Free education? For _everyone_? Why?"

"Why not?"

"What, so wealthy, high-class people in Muggle culture are taught alongside commoners?"

She sighed. "No. There are schools just for rich kids, that their parents pay for. The standard of education is generally higher than the free schools."

"I should think so, if it's for the upper crust. If you're going to pay for education yourself, it better be a damn sight better than what the common rabble get."

She rolled her eyes at his classism and went back to her work. As she sat there working on some theoretical models of potential failure modes for the ritual, Draco stared thoughtfully at her.

"What?" she asked him, when she noticed.

"It's just... I never knew Muggles were so good at maths. How far did you get in your classes?"

"Oh. Well, I was still in primary school, so we never officially got past stuff like long division, some algebra, fractions, and so on. But there was a public library I would go to at times, and they had books about maths, from higher grades. I think I was just starting pre-calculus when I got my Hogwarts letter."

"I don't know what that means."

"Well, from what I've seen of arithmancy books, I'd say it's fifth or sixth year arithmancy."

"You were doing the equivalent of fifth or sixth year arithmancy when you were 11?" Draco asked, incredulous.

"I think so. I can't be sure, exactly. But I've kept going over the years. I've been devouring university-level maths textbooks ever since, and some of those make pre-calculus and even calculus look simple by comparison."

Draco whistled in an impressed way. "Wow. Okay, we _have_ to teach you Ancient Runes. You could do all sorts-"

"I'm in Ancient Runes already. It's one of my classes. I've been reading ahead there as well."

"What level are you at?"

"I've been working with the sixth-year textbook lately, when I can."

"Not surprising. You know, if you keep going on Ancient Runes, between that and the maths you can do in your head, you could become a master ward-cracker, even get a job as a curse-breaker for Gringotts."

"I suppose so. Anyway, I'm ready to botch this ritual." She got out her dicta-quill and spoke to it. "Objective: botch a magical ritual to glean more data for analysis of where the extra energy goes during such botched rituals. Test ritual: gaining enhanced hearing for ten minutes by sacrificing the ability to speak for ten minutes. First round will be a control."

"Control? What's a control?"

"Meaning I'm going to do it properly the first time, so I know I can do it right. The second attempt will be the first deliberate botch."

Draco watched, silent, as Hypatia did the control ritual, which worked perfectly. When she was able to speak again, she told him of how she'd heard mice in the walls, the snoring of all the students in Slytherin, and even a dripping faucet in one of the bathrooms.

Then, of course, it was time to botch the ritual. She did the ritual, and this time she couldn't speak for twenty minutes. For some reason, she took her glasses off within a minute of the ritual starting, only putting them back on when she could speak again. When she was done, she spoke to her dicta-quill.

"Result of botched spell: inability to speak for 20 minutes, only had enhanced hearing for five minutes. But I noticed my visual acuity went up noticeably for the entire duration. Interesting result."

She did several more experiments with purposefully botching the ritual, messing it up a different way each time, writing down the results. Sometimes there were clear results, other times there was no noticeable result, even when she probed her body's abilities and the brain's contents. One of the botched rituals even hit Draco, rendering them both mute for a time.

"Well," she said when she was done. "That's a lot of interesting data. Analysis isn't going to be easy. After all, some of those times, the energy could have gone shooting off at random and doing random things around the school for all I know. I'll have to keep my ears open for tales of anomalies."

They'd been working together again several times since the First Task had ended. The Yule Ball was fast approaching. As it did, Hypatia noticed Draco acting strange around her. One of these times, she looked up from her work.

"Why are you acting so weird lately, Draco? It's like you're not concentrating on our work."

"Oh, well... it's just... well, I mean I know you never meet me outside of these night-time meetings of ours, but I have to ask you something."

"What is it?"

"Um... the Yule Ball is coming up soon. I was wondering if you would be my date for the evening?"

That took the wind right out of her sails. She felt like laughing, though she also felt like crying. She suppressed both urges. Given her strange affect, either reaction would be confusing to him.

"I can't, Draco. I'm sorry, I just can't. I... I would if I could. But I can't."

"Ah. I thought so. Well, I had to ask anyway."

"I'm truly sorry, Draco."

He half-grinned. "I know."

They tried to go back to work, but neither could focus anymore. Finally, they switched from a 'working on stuff together' mode into 'just hanging out' mode.

Things went mostly the same for her for months after that. Largely ignoring the plight of the others because she found their complaints about the warming charm to be annoyingly ridiculous, seeing as the obvious solution was to overpower the charm or use runes, she was focusing on her projects with Draco, which were ramping up. The puzzle in the Second Task she had figured out in less than a minute, and found everyone else's struggles with the childishly simple puzzle to be very amusing.

She was getting really good at ritual magic, with Draco's help. She was even working on ways to use her knowledge of ritual magic to help the others if something _actually_ life-threatening came up again, as it was bound to. Her research into ritual magic so far that year had yielded some interesting results, and she was starting to improve on many of the rituals she knew about already, because she found flaws in their arithmancy, or places where a greater understanding of arithmancy – paired with the power of the multiple constructs she had for doing maths – could yield impressive results.

"As you can see here," she said at one of these meetings with Draco, a week before the Easter holidays, "the sacrifices don't need to be related symbolically with their rewards, but can instead be broken down into simple units of power. There's still some limits, both hard and soft limits, but I've figured out how to distribute multiple smaller sacrifices to equal the sacrificial energy requirements of whatever ritual you want to use. My theory is that the symbolic connections most wizards think are inherent in ritual magic are only there to make it easier to remember and concentrate on, a bit like how people used to remember things by making them into poems or songs before reading became so common.

"Also, I can now plug ritual sacrifice energy into wand spells to super-chage them. What's more, I can bundle the energy from smaller sacrifices into a ritual. So for instance, instead of getting a migraine for an hour to have the power to lift a boulder by yourself with a super-charged levitation ritual, you can instead do a bundle of smaller sacrifices, such as the following bundle: get some slight back pain, give up the ability to speak for ten minutes, give up the ability to use a Summoning Charm for ten minutes, get a hand cramp for ten minutes, and some muscle weakness for 15 or 20 minutes.

"That's just one potential bundle, of course. The point is, arithmantically speaking, the multiple smaller sacrifices equal the cost of the larger sacrifice the ritual normally calls for. Of course it's trickier doing it that way, and more can go wrong if you mess it up, but given that some rituals demand rather a lot of you for their cost, it might be worth the risk in some cases to split the load rather than, for instance, cripple yourself for life."

Draco looked impressed. "This is... amazing. I don't think I could possibly do one of these without a _lot_ of planning ahead of time, though. But I think I just saw you adapt a ritual you'd never heard of before tonight in ten minutes, in your head. Am I right?"

She shrugged. "I guess so."

Draco burst out laughing. Hypatia raised her eyebrow, and waited for the blond boy to calm down enough to explain.

"Oh my," he said, wiping his eyes where they'd been watering with mirth. "Potter thinks he's so great, with that Granger on his side. Jokes on him, though; you're ten times the witch _she_ is."

She shrugged, uncomfortable. "I dunno. Hermione Granger is good at nearly everything she does. Aside from dropping out of Divination, her academic record is better-than-perfect scores in _every_ subject. Well, then there's Potions, but that's more because Snape doesn't like her. Anyway, she's a Jill of all trades. Me, though? I'm good at Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, ritual magic, sneaking around, and learning languages. I'm average at everything else, though."

Draco made a dismissive gesture and sound. "So what? Even if you're rubbish at everything else, you're so good at the things you're good at that it puts everything Granger does to shame. With your skills, you could probably even take on the dark lord himself and survive."

"Er... that's high praise. Don't know if I'd go that far, myself. Anyway, I hope I never have to find out if you're right."

Draco shuddered. "Me neither."

She went back to her work, but he sat there watching her, silent for a long time before speaking at last.

"Hypatia?" Draco finally said, breaking the silence.

"Yes? What is it?"

"You know... I think I have it figured out, why you can't meet me in person in the daytime."

She froze, her insides dropping, but said only, "Oh?"

"Yes. And well... I know I've said some things to Potter that might have made you think I wouldn't accept you for it, but I was only saying those things to Potter to get under their skin. Well, and I really did think those things then. But Professor Snape pointed out to me that I might be hurting people other than Potter, even some within Slytherin, with my words. And well... lately, some of the things you've said have made me wonder..."

"Wonder what?" she asked tremulously.

"Just, well... I don't want to presume, but... if you're... well, if you're transgender, I don't care about that. If you're in the closet about it, I understand. And I'm sorry I said those things to Potter. I never dreamed I might be hurting you with those words, too. But it makes sense, and it's the only explanation that does. I mean, you're a metamorphmagus, and since you're not out about it... well that would explain why I never see you during the day. I keep looking for a girl, and you're probably in disguise as a boy during the day. You might look nothing like this, even. Er... if I'm guessing right, that is."

 _(Holy shit I dodged a bullet there,)_ she thought, finally releasing the breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

"Oh, uh... okay. Right," she said. "Yeah, I didn't want to tell you, but you guessed it. Hypatia Williams, thought a boy since birth, was always secretly a girl, using her metamorphmagus powers to be her true self at night. I'm glad to know you feel that way. I'm sorry I couldn't tell you before. I was scared to be myself in the daytime. And Potter's fame, and that Skeeter woman didn't help any."

"You know, my father knows Rita Skeeter. I could get him to lean on her to find something else about Potter to focus on than her gender status."

She blinked at him. "You could do that? Without making your father suspicious?"

"Well, I can just tell him the truth, or part of it; I can tell him I have a transgender friend, and Skeeter's articles focusing on Potter's gender are making my friend more scared and uncomfortable than before."

"Right. Well just as long as you don't out me to anyone."

"I won't. And I don't expect you to visit with me in the daytime. I suppose you don't want to be seen by me while you're looking like a boy. And I've known you solely as a girl for so long, I might slip up and use the pronouns for your secret self. I don't want to do that to you, Hypatia."

"Thank you. I appreciate that. If I ever get to come out in the daytime, to be myself at last, I'll look you up."

Draco smiled. "Excellent. I hope you find the strength to do that. But I can wait. And if it never happens, I'll still be your friend."

"Thank you."

She sat there, her eyes on her work, but her mind elsewhere. The silence stretched on, until she finally broke it again.

"Draco?"

"Yes?"

"Knowing what you know now. Well... you once asked me to the Yule Ball. If I were to come out during the day... and there was another ball... would you still want to go with me?"

Draco smiled. "And have at my arm the cleverest, most intelligent girl I've ever met?" he said, taking her arm in a genteel manner and kissing her hand. "In a heartbeat."

Far from comfort her, this threw her thoughts and feelings into greater turmoil. Because he still didn't know. He thought he did, but he didn't. She wanted to laugh, to scream maybe. He could never know the full truth. She had no idea how he would react to knowing she was one of the Potters, but she didn't think it would be good. Her friendship with him was built on a foundation of lies. That Draco thought he'd penetrated the lies and found the truth only made the treachery of it worse. Knowing the full truth, even if she got a chance to explain that she kept the others ignorant of her existence, that all her memories from the night were hers alone... it would still likely be the end of her only friendship.

And just like that, the feelings passed. Where they went, she didn't know. But they were replaced with a sort of apathetic resignation. The lies would continue. She had no other viable option, at this point, none that she could see.

"You know," Draco said, pulling her out of her thoughts, "your talk of splitting up the sacrificial energy into smaller sacrifices has me thinking about a book Father told me about once. It's said to be in an un-crackable cipher. But I think I recall you mentioning that Muggles have worked out how to crack so-called un-crackable ciphers before, using maths. With your skills in arithmancy, there's a book you might be the first to benefit from in hundreds of years. It was lost for some centuries, then the goblins found it and they've been trying to crack it for a century at least, with no luck."

"Aside from the challenge of trying to crack it, what might I get out of it?"

"There you go, thinking like a Slytherin again, you clever goddess. What you could get out of it, of course, is that it's said to be filled with some extremely powerful spells that involve human sacrifice, mostly of the willing variety. The person who wrote it was also trying to unlock the ability to sacrifice _other people's magic_ in addition to or instead of one's own magic. Well technically that was already possible at the time, but it's rumored he was trying to do it _without_ killing the people sacrificed. He never managed it, but he's said to have gotten quite a ways on it. Quite apart from anything else, if it could be made to work it would make group rituals a lot simpler."

"How's that?"

"Well currently, if a bunch of people get together to do a ritual casting, they have to have equal levels of power and skill. That's not easy to measure in the first place, and even harder to find. Also, they have to sacrifice equal amounts of whatever they're sacrificing of themselves. Basically they're all doing separate rituals and trying to plug them all together. All those things together make group rituals about twenty times trickier than the trickiest single-person ritual. But with your advanced arithmancy skills and that ability to do complex maths in your head, if you could figure out how to adapt your 'smaller sacrifices bundle' finding to group rituals... you could _rule the world_ with that kind of power!" His face briefly lit up with megalomaniacal glee.

"Rule the world?"

He quickly got his face back under control, in a somewhat catlike way. "As an example. I don't know the specifics of how much power that would be, or what you could do with it. But for an example, Mother told me tales in my youth of Merlin and Salazar Slytherin, two men of equal power, working together in battle to use a two-man ritual to defeat armies of hundreds of Muggle soldiers. They didn't do it more than a couple times, because it was extremely risky and difficult, but according to Mother, they got desperate enough to try it at least twice. There's even a rumor they botched a third attempt, and that their botched third attempt was what killed them both."

"I don't want to kill anyone, Draco."

"Well neither do I. I just don't have any better examples. You're the one who can think of clever things to do with magical power, what would _you_ do with that kind of power?"

"I don't know. I also doubt two people, even at Merlin's level, could dredge up that much power between them. Not unless they were super-charging the Killing Curse or something like that."

"What else might you be able to do with that kind of power, I wonder?"

"It's hard to say without the right information. I'd need to study this book you mentioned, crack the code and read the author's equations. But if I had to guess... estimating the kind of energy needed to kill 500 or more Muggles in one blow, with an enhanced Killing Curse... hmm... well I've always wondered if dementors can be killed? I mean, they're not technically alive. But they _can_ breed after a fashion, like dry rot or fungi. And they don't like bright sunlight. But they can manipulate the local weather, in large groups; creating storms, making the temperature drop. Our third year there were at least 100 of them haunting the grounds, and the weather was more horrible than usual, with far more storms and the like. Given these facts, if they couldn't ever die in some way, they'd have overrun the planet a long time ago. There'd be nothing left _but_ dementors if they couldn't die. But nobody's yet figured out how to kill one, to my knowledge."

"Where are you going with this?"

"Well, if you could plug that kind of energy into a Patronus Charm, you could probably make a super-charged Patronus strong enough to kill dementors."

"Yes, but you'd have to be able to cast a Patronus first."

"Oh, I can."

"You can? Really? I'd be interested to learn that one, if you're telling the truth."

"Okay. _Expecto Patronum!_ "

Her shining, shimmering cuttlefish Patronus appeared before them.

"WOW!" Draco nearly shouted. "That's incredible! What kind of creature _is_ that, though?"

"It's called a cuttlefish. They're not technically fish, though. More closely related to squids and octopi. They're famous, at least among Muggles, for being able to change color and shape. They're incredible mimics. They can even pretend to be hermit crabs! They use it to hunt."

Draco chuckled. "The perfect Patronus for a metamorphmagus, then."

"Yeah, except it might out that particular ability to others."

"Ah yes, there is that. But most wizards don't know cuttlefish, I think. At least, I doubt any of the purebloods would know of them."

"Heh. I guess."

"So you reckon you could super-charge a Patronus to kill dementors, not just scare them away?"

"Well I'd like to at least run the numbers to see if it's possible. And then, of course, attempt the spell and ritual to see if it would actually do that."

"In that case, you'll need the book. I know of a bookstore in Knockturn Alley that would have it, and a few other hard-to-find books of a similar nature, that would benefit your research. And given how much they likely cost, I'd have to pay for them, or have Father do it."

"What? No no, having him send you books from your private library is quite an imposition as is, I couldn't ask you to spend so much on me."

"You're not asking, though; I am. I'm investing in you, Hypatia. It pays to invest in talent of your caliber. I don't know what you'll do with your life, Hypatia, but the possibilities are magnificent. I simply _have_ to do everything I can to help you."

She blinked, his words stopping her completely. "I... well, I suppose I can't refuse an investment like that."

"Well you could, but you'd be mad to."

She smiled. "Yes, I would. Alright then, order the books."

"I'll start on the letter to Father right now."

No sooner had he sat down to write the letter, though, than he was yawning.

"It's late. We both need to get some sleep," Hypatia said.

"This won't take long."

"Well if you want to stay up to write the letter, go ahead. But it really is late, and I really do need to get going."

"Can't you just stay here for the night? I can set up a camp bed for you or something."

"Right, a Ravenclaw who's a closeted trans girl spending the night in the Slytherin dorms, sleeping. That'd go over _so_ well. Flitwick would be thrilled, of course. And Snape-"

"Yeah okay, I get it. Big trouble. A thousand points from Ravenclaw, probably five hundred from Slytherin for my letting you do it. I'll see you in a couple days, okay?"

"Sure thing," she said, slipping the invisibility cloak back on. "Bye, Draco!"

"Bye, Hypatia!"

The note they'd left her had been annoying. She didn't know how they'd figured it out, but she thought the best response was no response at all, and ignored the note, doing her utmost to leave no trace of her presence behind for them to find. But it hadn't worked; they were still suspicious, and told McGonagall about their suspicions. Nosy brats.

So, to get back at them in a passive-aggressive sort of way, she switched to Tier's old form of the body before going to bed, and turned off his and Zoey's powers. It was stupid, she knew they'd suspect her even more, but she was angry and trying to send them a message: don't bother me.

Naturally, it didn't work. Worse, Tier told Ron his suspicions. Hermione didn't see the rest of the note, though, so that annoyingly clever meddler probably didn't know, which was a good thing. In a snit, Hypatia left them that way for two weeks before returning them back to normal.

Her plan with Draco ended up not being quite so simple as they'd hoped. Mr. Malfoy had been under a lot more scrutiny from certain Ministry employees since the Chamber of Secrets business, and could not be seen going to Knockturn Alley without sufficiently good reason to risk it; fueling the curiosity of one of Draco's friends about a book that was likely impossible to decipher wasn't his idea of a worthy enough reason to risk his reputation.

Still, between the two of them, they came up with a clever alternative. Hypatia would be going to London for Easter, and Knockturn Alley was in London. Mr. Malfoy had ways of paying people that didn't trace back to him, even with the incredibly high price of this rare book, so he finally agreed to finance the scheme if this friend of Draco's was willing to risk themselves for this research project of theirs. He didn't exactly approve of a 14 year old witch going to Knockturn Alley, but when Draco assured him that she could disguise herself very cleverly (hinting at her being a metamorphmagus but never saying it outright), he finally gave in and sent them the money order to use. She had asked Draco how his father knew how much to make the order out for, and Draco shrugged, replying "Maybe his contacts got him the price." Then he gave her his own bag of gold to cover any difference there might be.

And so, armed with a list, a location, and her knowledge of wandless magic (which would register as accidental magic and thus fool the Trace), she got up the first night of Easter at Sirius's house, thought about using the invisibility cloak, decided it would attract the attention of thieves, and Disillusioned herself instead.

The wards were a challenge even for her, and it took her an hour of hard work, utilizing five different constructs to run different sets of equations, but eventually she worked out how to get past the wards without setting off the alarms. She would of course later discover, to her anger, that she'd overlooked an important detail in her analysis of the wards: the surveillance wards could see through Disillusionment Charms. But for then she slipped out, unaware she'd made a mistake.

When out of sight of the building the flat was in, she hid in a dark alley and transformed to her own form of the body, then Disillusioned herself again because the transformation had broken her earlier Disillusionment. Disillusioned again, she set off for Knockturn Alley.

Hypatia ducked into another alley just before getting to The Leaky Cauldron. She couldn't apparate yet, and the staff and/or patrons would notice a 14 year old girl out this late at night. She couldn't afford to stand out at all, so she tapped into Tier's abilities and made herself look older, in her mid 30's, and less distinctive by giving herself plainer glasses and black hair instead of her usual white hair. Thus disguised, she went into The Leaky Cauldron...

...only to find it empty. She shrugged; the disguise was still a good idea, so she kept it on. She went back to the back of the building where the wall into Diagon Alley was, and used her wand to activate the brick.

Diagon Alley at night was... a little creepy, but the night-time lights in the shop windows lent it a cozy kind of creepiness, if that makes any sense. It was, at least, a lot cozier than Knockturn Alley. Though Knockturn was largely dead in the daytime, it exploded with life at night. The lights, such as they were, were often blood red or dark purple, casting more shadows than they banished. But the place was packed with witches and wizards skulking around, their wands lit or carrying weird light sources like a lantern made from a human skull. Hypatia herself used no lights, not trusting she could make one without setting off the Trace. Instead, she used Tier's powers again and gave herself keen night vision. She was sure her eyes would glow with sufficient light, but that wasn't a huge concern yet. Getting to the right shop and getting home again safe, that was what mattered.

Despite her lack of lighting, or perhaps because of it, people kept glancing at her. Some even leered at her, which made her so uncomfortable that she quickly put together and cast a bit of ritual magic (which should also fool the Trace), sacrificing a dozen insignificant things to give her what she decided to call a 'Don't Notice Me' spell. She wasn't invisible or Disillusioned, which would be a huge hassle with the crush of bodies in this place, but instead, people saw her but weren't interested. She was like a bit of the background, seen but not noticed. They even moved out of her way as she walked, and they were clearly unaware that they'd even done so. She knew that if anyone asked them why they'd done it, they'd be baffled.

The shop she went to was tiny, and the few books on display were all locked up tight in wooden cabinets with unbreakable glass fronts. Given some of the prices on them, she wasn't surprised.

Her 'Don't Notice Me' wasn't strong enough to keep working if she did something to deliberately get someone's attention; it was ephemeral, and would burst like a bubble when she did.

"Hey, anyone here in this dump?" she said aloud. She noticed a little bell, and rang it a couple times.

"Eh shet it, lashie, Ah heerd ya tha firsht time ya shpoke. Hold onna yar breeches, I ent ash young ash Ah used ta beh."

From around a corner in the back came (very, _very_ slowly) a person, gender indecipherable, of such great age and decrepitude that they made Dumbledore look like a young Olympic athlete by comparison. The person, who was probably the shop keeper, looked like they were made entirely of beef jerky that had shriveled even further by some sort of dark magic until their nose was nearly touching the ground. If they'd introduced themselves as being an Incan mummy animated by magic, Hypatia would have had no problem at all believing it.

The shop keeper was stumping along on a pair of crutches made of wood more gnarled and hideous than they were, moving along so slowly that a slug could probably lap them twice in a race. Luckily, the shop keeper didn't have far to go. In no more than five agonizingly slow minutes, they were standing in front of Hypatia. Then, so suddenly it made her jump, the floor jumped up under the shriveled old store owner, bringing their eyes up level with Hypatia's own.

"'Not as young as you used to be'?" she said. "That's the understatement of the century. If you were any older, you'd be able to tell me stories about your grandson Merlin."

She quickly covered her own mouth, unsure why she was being so flippant. But the old shop-keep just chuckled in a wheezy way, exactly like she imagined a mummy would sound as it tried to get the dust out of its leathery lungs.

"Ah likesh ya, lashie. Not afeered a makin a jerk at ern old man'sh ekshpensh, en laffer'sh all Ah gotsh left that worksh enemar. What kern Ah do yeh fer?"

"I have a list of books to get. My contacts tell me you have them."

She passed him the list and he got out an enormous magnifying glass to examine it, even though it was written in large letters and he was wearing glasses with lenses as thick as her fist.

"Hoo boy datsh a heck erv a lisht yeh got thar. Gerna corsht yeh a perty shickle. Lemme she har, how mushud dat be? Ah heer we arr, twenty-nine thoushand galleonsh fer the lot."

"WHAT? Twenty-nine... _thousand_... galleons!?"

"Yeh. Shuper rare, dat wun berk. Da uddersh ent cheap nyder."

She realized then that she hadn't looked at Mr. Malfoy's money order. She did now, and found she was 1000 galleons short. She looked in Draco's gold bag and found only 94 galleons in it.

"Counter-offer: Twenty-eight thousand galleons."

"Heh, right. Ah'd be takin a losh at that prysh. Caint do et, lashie."

"I thought we were haggling here."

"Ah don't haggle."

"Listen, all I have on me is twenty-eight thousand and 94 galleons."

The shop-keep stroked his chin, apparently thinking. "Well... thash a bit clohsher. Shtill nearly a thoushand galleonsh short."

She silently berated herself then for not bringing her own cheques. Not that she wanted to link the others to this purchase for a couple of huge reasons, but still...

"Could I make up the difference with a bit of knowledge?"

"Knowledge? Hmm... Ah'm curioush what yeh think'd be werf nearly a thoushand galleonsh, lashie."

"How about a formula for replacing big sacrifices in ritual magic with an array of smaller sacrifices?"

His eyes weren't very visible behind his thick glasses, but she still saw his eyebrows go up.

"Well now if yeh can delifer on that, lashie, Ah'd take that deal. Yeh got et on yeh?"

She pulled a parchment out of her robes and – hoping that being in the thick of Knockturn Alley would fool the Trace – she tapped it with her wand. The parchment instantly filled up with a very long and complicated equation that filled both sides. She tapped another parchment to include explanations of some of the more esoteric parts of the formula.

The shop keeper looked over both parchments and whistled appreciatively.

"Carn't shay Ah unnershtand mosht erv thish here, but Ah grashp enough erv it where I'll take yer deal. Where'sh the uver twenty-eight thoushand and 94 galleonsh?"

Hypatia handed over the money order and the contents of Draco's coin purse. The old man nodded. Then he snapped his fingers and a very young looking house elf appeared.

"Bitsy is here, Master. How can Bitsy be of service?"

"Get theesh booksh, Bitshee. Yeh know where they are?"

"Of course, Master. Bitsy will be right back in a jiffy."

With a crack, the elf disappeared, and the old man got out a lock box and started dropping the money through a slot in the top. By the time he finished, Bitsy was back with a pile of books. She handed Hypatia the books and the list.

"Here you is, Miss. You is paid him, right?"

"Yesh, Bitshee, the lashie paid me. Ah just put et all en da boksh. Enjoy yer perchash, lashie. Been shwell doin bishnesh wif yeh."

"Just a moment, I had a question for Bitsy."

"What is you wanting to ask me?"

"Can you read, then?"

"Bitsy can read, yes. Well enough to read the titles, anyway. It is being an uncommon thing, house elves knowing how to read."

"That's what I thought. Well thank you, both of you."

"Bye, lashie!"

She wrapped her purchase up in twine and re-cast her 'Don't Notice Me' before leaving. Getting back home and into her bedroom was a lot easier. Having already cracked the wards, slipping in again took half the time and a fourth the effort. Once in her bedroom, she wrote a letter to add to the bundle of books for Draco, who was better able to keep them until school. Also, his father wanted to keep the originals and give her copies, which made more sense now than ever before.

 _Dear Draco,_

 _Twenty-nine THOUSAND galleons! I've never spent so much money in my life! I don't think my parents have had as much money in their whole lives! Oh yeah, your dad underestimated the price by 1000 galleons, and your coin purse only had 94 galleons in it. I had to give the old man my formula for bundled sacrifices to make up the difference. Though the fact he thought it was worth 1000 galleons is flattering._

 _Man, I've never seen someone so old. He could make Egyptian mummies look young and spry by comparison!_

 _Anyway, here's the books. I've put Imperturbable Charms on them. If they get lost or stolen or damaged en route, please don't take it out of my hide; I don't think I could ever repay a debt that huge. That said, let me know when you get them safe so I can stop worrying._

 _All for now. I gotta get these sent off before it's too late. See you after the holidays!_

 _Sincerely,_

 _Hypatia Williams_

The letter done, she went to another room so owls wouldn't come to the bedroom while the others were Out, sent it and the package off to Draco, switched back to Adira's form of the body, and went back to sleep.

"And there ends the story so far," Chandra finished, looking calmly at Dumbledore and Sirius.

The two men were staring, stunned by the story. Dumbledore was the first to recover his wits.

"Could we please meet Hypatia in person, Chandra?"

"I shall try, Silver Grandfather. She is rather upset at the moment. Years she went unsuspected, and suddenly in one night she makes a mistake and is exposed. But I will try."

He closed his eyes, his expression calm except for occasional twitches of Adira's face. Then, with no glow at all, Adira's face and body changed to that of a black girl with glasses and white dreadlocks. She looked miserable, and the moment she appeared, she hugged her legs tight to her body.

"Welcome, Ms. Williams," Dumbledore said.

She did not respond.

Snapping out of his own stunned silence at last, Sirius suddenly shouted, "You _sold_ that formula to a store in Knockturn Alley that deals in books about dark magic? Are you MAD? What if Voldemort gets hold of that?"

Jerking back in fright, Hypatia began laughing into her arms, the miserable laughter Chandra had described. It was very different from normal laughter indeed; it sounded superficially the same, but there was something off about it that did not have a happy sound to it.

"Sirius, please do not yell. This needs to be handled delicately."

He sighed. "Sorry, Dumbledore. Sorry, Hypatia."

It took Hypatia several minutes to stop her sorrowful laughter and look up. The next words came from her mouth but weren't hers.

"If he's going to get them, it would be through the Malfoys, surely? This is Al, by the way."

Dumbledore and Sirius looked at each other. But before they could say anything, Hypatia spoke in her own words this time.

"Don't be stupid. I haven't given Draco any copies of the formula. Even if I did, he wouldn't understand half of it. There's a lot of Muggle maths in it, well past his level of skill."

"Do not worry, Sirius," Dumbledore said. "I will take care of it. I know the shop in question, and the owner owes me some favors from decades ago. And he will want to pore over it first, and make copies, before he sells it."

"Well that's something, I guess. But ritual magic? I knew that Malfoy boy was a bad egg."

"He's _not_ , though," Hypatia said defensively. "The face he shows most people is different from his true face. He's got a lot of expectations to live up to, with who he is. His parents have their expectations, the Slytherins have theirs, the rest of the school has various expectations. He was upset when Harry rejected his friendship on the train, and he's got himself convinced he doesn't care about that. But I think all he ever wanted was to be Harry's friend. Now, though, years of playing the role he dug himself into in his upset keeps getting reinforced by Al's and Chandra's behavior, among others. He's resentful. It's something he and I have in common, that resentment, even though the causes are different."

"But he's got you into the dark arts!" Sirius said.

"Don't be dense! Weren't you paying attention to the story Chandra told you? It was _Chandra_ who introduced me to ritual magic, not Draco. So what do you think of _that_?" She glared at them both defiantly, her arms crossed.

She didn't let them answer, though, interrupting with, "There's nothing inherently bad about most ritual magic anyway, just because it's tricky and dangerous. Wand magic is tricky and dangerous too. And I would've gone researching ritual magic anyway, even _without_ Draco or any other person you've decided to be prejudiced against, both of you!"

"Be that as it may, Ms. Williams," Dumbledore said, "you really shouldn't be dabbling in dangerous magics. Some of the rituals you've gotten into are indeed dark, and illegal."

"Willingly sacrificing something of your own to get something in exchange is dark now, is it? This is exactly why I never wanted to be out in the open, because adults have these ridiculous arbitrary rules against things because they're too scared or too incompetent to do them correctly, and so therefore they just ban it. Anything that gives them the slightest bit of difficulty, anything that takes slightly more effort or thought than they're willing to put into something, and into the ban bin it goes! Adults are so infuriating! And the word 'adult' is so fitting, too, either way you pronounce it. Pronounce it one way, it sounds like 'a dolt.' Another way, and it sounds like 'addled.' I hope I never become one. Zoey has the right idea, refusing to grow any older. Sounds like something I should copy."

Sirius opened his mouth to speak, but Dumbledore stopped him, shaking his head.

"Pardon us a moment, Hypatia."

"Yeah, whatever."

The two adults went into another room, where Hypatia couldn't see or hear them.

"What is it, Dumbledore?"

"What she said just now reminded me of some details in Chandra's telling of her story. I do not believe it wise to antagonize Hypatia."

"What? Why not?"

"If you will recall from Chandra's story about her, she has a remarkable amount of control over the internal workings of the Potter collective. Writing and re-writing memories, being able to make modified copies of the others and pretending to be them, modifying her own personality as she pleases, even pulling Alastair back inside when he was having a fit... these details and others speak to a dangerous amount of power. Who knows what she could do if provoked? She could make all the others vanish and take over the body entirely if she wanted."

"Really? I mean, yes, she does seem to have a lot of power, but that much? I'm not so sure, Dumbledore. I remember the story, too, and Chandra mentioned that Mother can pull individuals back or push them forward. There were other details that make me think it's possible Hypatia and Mother have equal amounts of power, or possibly Hypatia's power is second to Mother's."

"I do not know, Sirius. Perhaps you're right. But..." he paused, turning to look around.

"What is it, Dumbledore?"

"I do not know. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, given what we just heard, but I think it likely Hypatia may be spying on us."

At these words, Hypatia walked forward, revealing herself. She was glaring at them, her arms folded across her chest.

"You think I'm some kind of monster, don't you? You think I'd delete the others like bad computer programs just because I got caught, don't you? Well you can relax on that front, both of you, because I don't have that kind of power. Pulling someone Inside, shutting off parts of their powers, slipping some false memories in to cover my tracks, or slipping in minor compulsions is the limit of my powers. I can create and destroy constructs, but I can't create or destroy any of the Faces. Anything with a Spark is largely autonomous.

"Honestly, if I had the kind of power you're worried I have, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with, because I would have deleted any suspicions from their minds if I could. And I sure as Hell wouldn't delete any of the others, no matter how much I dislike them, because that would be murder, which is Wrong.

"And anyway, I'm reasonably certain Mother has the power to overrule me anyway. After all, She created Chandra, who has a Spark. I can't do that, only She can. If I could do that, I would still be safely hidden away creating my own friends in the dark parts of this brain."

"Thank you for that, Hypatia, I do feel better now. But you are still doing illegal dark magic."

"Yes, and there's nothing you can do to stop me without it also affecting the others. Which you won't do, because you're trying to forge us into a weapon against Voldemort."

Dumbledore blinked. "Pardon?"

"Oh please, don't lie. It's obvious. In first year, those supposed obstacles you had guarding the Philosopher's Stone were ridiculously easy. So easy that several first year children – 11 and 12 year olds – got by them without too much difficulty, using information that conveniently came up during lessons that year. And really, it's strange that Voldemort didn't just blast through everything like a wrecking ball. Even weak, he was riding around in Quirrell, who should've been able to manage it pretty well. That suggests a trap set for Voldemort. But since no trap went off, and he got away, clearly you wanted us to face him in something of a controlled environment. Only it backfired on you, and we nearly died. Hell, the damned door to Fluffy's room wasn't even properly locked!"

Sirius looked ill and livid. He rounded on Dumbledore. "Is that all true, Dumbledore?"

Dumbledore looked like he didn't know what to say or do, like he was thinking very quickly. Then he sighed, and looked down at the ground.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time. I did not anticipate you being able to get the stone out of the Mirror of Erised. Very few people would be capable of that."

Sirius's face was growing red-hot with anger at this. "ARE YOU MAD, DUMBLEDORE? Why the bloody _hell_ would you risk their lives that way?"

"At the time, they had the protection of their mother's sacrifice to protect them. So I felt it was safe."

"Yes, and that doesn't make any sense either. If it was that simple to save someone from the Killing Curse, I wouldn't be the first to survive it, I'd be the millionth or billionth person to survive it. Honestly, I suspect Lily probably used some kind of ritual magic; she knew she'd have to die to protect us, and she did some kind of ritual to trade her life for mine. Ours. You know what I mean."

"As to that, Hypatia, I do not know. Though Lily did have an attitude very similar to yours, in that she thought many of the types of magic illegal in this country should be legal. It was something we disagreed on."

Just then, an eagle owl screeched and flew into the room. It landed on a chair back and glared at Dumbledore and Sirius.

"It is for you, Hypatia."

Hypatia took the letter and opened it. She read it silently, and then aloud.

 _Dear Hypatia Williams,_

 _We received your package, and will find a way to get it to you in Hogwarts, since you are unable to keep it with yourself. Do not worry about the cost; if what Draco says about you is true, it is a worthy investment, which I have no doubt will pay tremendous dividends back in the future. If you are able to crack the code of the book, that alone will more than make up the cost, and be of tremendous profit if you should choose to share it with my son._

 _As to being short, you should have insisted on haggling. The old man... I know him, and so I can assure you he ripped you off by deliberately raising the price. He was doubtless hoping you would have something to trade that would make up the difference. That formula is worth the entire price of those books, and he knew that from the start. I shall be paying him a visit to retrieve your property and erase the knowledge of it from his stupid little mind._

 _If you are worried I will copy the formula myself, you need not do so. I know too many people in whose hands I do not wish to see such power fall, and so I will be employing occlumency to keep what little I know of the formula away from them._

 _I have no doubt, Hypatia Williams, that you will one day become a great sorceress whose powers will someday rival, perhaps even exceed, those of the Dark Lord himself. I suggest that, like many great witches and wizards from history, you keep the bulk of your work secret, sharing it only with those you trust the most. There are not many in the world with the skills or the raw power to utilize your arrayed sacrifice method, but many of the ones who_ _ **do**_ _posses those talents are_ _ **very**_ _dangerous people, people I do not trust with such power, and neither should you. There is one in particular that I am concerned about, more so than ever these days. Be very careful not to catch his eye, Ms. Williams._

 _Expect another owl by nightfall, Ms. Williams, with the parchment you gave him and all copies he has made. I swear on my magic that I will return this formula to you and keep it away from anyone other than yourself and my son, should you choose to share the details of it with him._

 _Yours in fellowship,_

 _Lord Lucius Malfoy_

Dumbledore had his wand out and was hitting the bird with a spell the moment she was finished, before it could fly off. The bird looked very confused.

"Just a confusion charm," Dumbledore said. "I will send this bird home with its memory modified, Hypatia. Owls cannot speak, but they are still clever enough it might find a way to tell its master you were with us."

Dumbledore left the room as he said, with the bird. Hypatia folded up the letter and put it in her pocket. The next few minutes were silent and awkward, neither she nor Sirius talking.

"You don't really trust him not to keep a copy of that for himself, do you?" Sirius finally asked her.

"What letter were you listening to? He plainly wants to forget he ever heard of the formula. He's terrified of Voldemort returning, or was that not obvious?"

"That could be a ruse."

"Draco's mum never supported Voldemort. Never defied him either. From what I gather from my talks with Draco, though, his father started having second thoughts about being a Death Eater once Draco was born. And in the 13 years Voldemort has been gone, Lucius apparently decided 'good riddance.' But it's odd... my impression was that Lucius thought Voldemort dead. Now he seems convinced the berk is coming back. He must know something we don't. Which would fit with that vision we had in August."

"The owl is attended to," Dumbledore said as he came back.

"Good. Now we can get back to our chat about how you're trying to forge us into a weapon against Voldemort."

"Yes, Dumbledore, let us indeed talk of that again," Sirius said, crossing his arms.

"I admit that in the first year I let you face Voldemort. I did not anticipate you being able to get the stone out of the mirror, which would likely have meant they were simply frustrated long enough for me to waltz in and trap them both. If you recall, I came in right after you killed Quirrell, just before you passed out. If you had been unable to get the stone out of the mirror, like I had planned, the two of you would not have fought; you would have still been tied up and Quirrell would still have been scratching his head at the Mirror.

"Of course, it did not work out that way. And then you did not go back to the Dursleys, so you no longer had the protection of your mother's sacrifice, however it was that happened. Thus, I can say I did indeed suspect a basilisk, but since I had no idea where the Chamber's entrance was, I couldn't send any aurors there to deal with it. Thus, your second meeting with Voldemort was entirely unplanned on my part, and unwanted. Alastair broke his promise to me."

"You didn't think it just a little obvious that the bathroom Moaning Myrtle was killed in was the entrance?"

"No, I did not. Myrtle Warren's ghost did not answer any questions about her death, she was too upset about it. She soon took to haunting one of girls who had made fun of her before she'd died. It was years before the girl was able to get a restraining order against Myrtle, and by then it no longer seemed important."

"And you didn't think to ask her when it happened again?"

"Fifty years had passed; I admit I forgot about it for most of the year. When I did think about it, I decided there was no point; she was still known to cry at the drop of a hat. I was astonished to find she'd told you about it. Of course, when I thought about it, I suspected as you did, that the entrance was in her bathroom, but I did not seek to confirm it. What would I have done if I had found it? I was afraid to ask any of you to open the Chamber in case the basilisk came popping out of the thing to kill us both, and the only other Parselmouths I had any inkling about were all in India. It would have meant getting the Ministry involved, and if they'd known there was a basilisk in the school, they would have shut down the school for sure. In fact, they still don't know about the basilisk. I never told them. Mainly because it's still alive, and has been there for 1000 years with only two incidents, and only one death."

"What if that thing had come into the Great Hall during dinner?"

"That was unlikely. Voldemort would not want to kill purebloods or even half-bloods, unless they were also blood traitors. And as Chandra pointed out from the story of your memories, Hypatia, the basilisk did not want to attack students at all. Now it is on our side, so it's even less likely to be a problem.

"Anyway, enough about my failings. We were originally discussing what to do about you."

"Yes. And I was telling you that you can't punish me without punishing the others."

"I could always take the books away from you when I find them."

"I doubt you could do it fast enough to beat me to the information. Which would render your confiscation of the books moot. And you can't stop me experimenting with forbidden magic without getting your weapon against Voldemort, you little Chosen One, expelled or thrown into Azkaban. And anyway, isn't any possible edge against Voldemort a good thing?"

Dumbledore stared at Hypatia. She felt a tingle that said he was using legilimency on her. She kept staring at him.

He blinked first, and sighed. "I hate to say it, but you do have an excellent point. And we are not in school right now, so points cannot be taken. Any other punishment I could do would hurt the others, who were ignorant of your doings. So I will punish you the only way I have left. Swear to me on your magic that you will do all you can to protect yourself and the other Potters, even if it means talking and cooperating with them to save them."

She sighed. "Fine. I swear by my magic that I will do all I can to protect myself and the other Potters in the collective, even if that means I have to talk with them and cooperate with them to save them from danger. Happy now?"

"Yes," Dumbledore said. "And now I think I shall return to Hogwarts."

"Fine by me. But before you go, I should tell you that the whole 'exploding' thing was really annoying me, so I worked out what was causing it and fixed it. No more explosions."

"Excellent," Dumbledore said, smiling and twinkling at her, but she was immune to his grandfatherly charm, and just continued to glare at him.

Sirius looked confused. "I want to know how this Draco boy is able to send owls to you when your body's name isn't _really_ Hypatia Williams."

Instead of answering, she huffed and vanished, being replaced with Adira.

Adira stood there, looking dazed. "I... I'm gonna go lay down for a while, Sirius. I need to think."

"You do that, pup. I could do with some of that myself."

At the kitchen table in the round kitchen of her home, Luna Lovegood sat thinking while she waited for her father to finish making his gurdyroot tea. When he approached the table and poured her a cup, she was still lost in thought.

"Infestation of wrackspurts, my moonbeam?"

"What? Oh sorry, Daddy. I was just thinking."

"Lost in thought instead? Good. Wrackspurts can be very vexing."

Xeno waited, sipping his gurdyroot tea. He waited because he knew his daughter would talk about what she was thinking about if and when she was ready. And he thought she was nearly there.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, Luna my love?"

"What are your thoughts on people who are romantically interested in members of their own gender?"

Xeno sipped his tea again, thinking what to say. "Well, my moonbeam, I think it's like someone's taste in food or drink. For instance, you and I love gurdyroot tea, but a lot of other witches and wizards think it tastes horrendous. There's nothing wrong with not liking gurdyroot tea, of course. To each their own, you know."

He paused, thinking some more before adding, "And as much as I'm glad we can share this tea, if your tastes changed and you no longer liked it, I would understand. Then too, people can like gurdyroot tea and still like other teas as well. And it just occurred to me this metaphor leaves much to be desired."

Luna smiled. "I understand your meaning. I'm glad to hear that, Daddy."

Xeno waited some more, still sipping his tea. She stared at her cup for several minutes before looking up at him.

"Do you remember me writing you about Iliana Potter?"

"Ah yes, the Potters. Fascinating group of people, I really must meet them sometime. Iliana is the one who helped ward your possessions against theft, correct?" She nodded. "Good. She sounds a lovely girl, a wonderful friend. As I recall, you also danced with her at the Yule Ball?"

"Yes, I did."

"Excellent. So what _about_ Miss Potter? What was on your mind, moonbeam?"

She sipped some of her tea to give herself time to think. "Do you remember I told you she exploded?"

"Yes, quite the odd phenomenon, that. I do hope she can get that under control."

"Yes, me too. Anyway, it seems to happen if she gets overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. The first time it happened, they were all so excited for Christmas that they fought for control of their body and resulted in an explosion. The second time... I didn't tell you in my letter, but the second time was because she has feelings for me, of the romantic sort, and was scared to tell me. She didn't want to risk my not wanting to be her friend anymore, but she also couldn't keep her feelings to herself. The conflict made her explode."

"I see. That explains your first question. But there's more, isn't there?"

"Yes. Because I realized I had some sort of feelings for her, too. I think it's the same ones she has for me. I didn't even realize they were there until she told me hers. I'm still not sure what I'm feeling."

Xeno nodded. "Feelings are sometimes like that, my moonbeam."

"I know I had fun at the dance. I was glad she asked me to come to the ball, even if it was wasn't as a date. She didn't know her feelings at the time, she told me. She just knew she wanted to see me have some fun. And I did. Especially when we danced – really danced – together. The spinning and twirling, holding each other close, and then by accident we did a perfect dip, and were looking into each other's eyes. I felt something then, but I don't know what it was. Before I could even start to try to identify it, she got very awkward and nervous, and she ran off to switch to one of the others. Which left me a little sad and disappointed, to be honest."

She sipped her tea again, then continued, "She had a difficult time telling me her feelings, in the hospital wing when I was visiting her. So hard a time that I thought she didn't want to be friends anymore. But when I told her I would understand if she didn't want to be friends anymore, even though it would make me sad, she burst into tears, hugged me tight, and confessed her feelings."

"That poor dear girl, putting herself through all that worry."

"Yes, quite. Well you can imagine, I'm sure, how relieved I was to hear that. But I couldn't quite believe it, either. I mean, I don't much comb my hair, and I know I look odd even before you count my unusual beliefs and behaviors. And for years I never had any friends at all. Then suddenly my one real friend tells me she has feelings for me. Romantic feelings. I never thought anyone would ever have feelings like that for me. And I never thought it would be another girl, nor that I'd feel things for another girl myself.

"And of course, I'm just not sure what I'm feeling, even now. I had fun at the ball with her, and we had a lovely date at Hogsmeade, holding hands and sitting together against the tree on the hill. It was nice. I think it might be the seed of love, if not love itself yet. Well obviously I love her as a friend, but I mean it might be the seed of a different kind of love. I just don't know."

Xeno put his cup down and set his hand on hers. "Don't worry if you don't know what you're feeling, my moonbeam. Just take your time and let the feelings wash over you. Enjoy your time with her, whatever it means. You don't need to label it. Or rather, if you do, there's no rush. The label, if you need one, will come in its own time." A thought occurred to him then, and he frowned a little, adding, "she isn't pressuring you into anything, is she?"

"Oh no, Daddy. Quite the opposite. When I took her up to the top of the hill, she got all flustered and asked me why I brought her there. I'm pretty sure she just wants to take it slow as well. I think she's still sorting out her feelings, too."

"Well as long as she isn't expecting you to jump right into snogging, or something more serious. Oh my, I'm going to have to give you The Talk, aren't I? Oh, and this complicates that. I feel silly, now, for not taking this possibility into consideration before."

"You can take some time to think about it, Daddy. We won't be doing anything like that anytime soon. I don't even think kissing will happen for another month or so, if not longer. I mean, I could be wrong, but I very much doubt either of us will be ready for more than that." Her brow burrowed in thought a moment, and she added, "I wonder what two girls can do together beyond kissing and groping?"

Xeno chuckled. "Well maybe we should pop over to London this afternoon. I know the Muggles have some lovely big libraries in London. There's a library in the village of course, but I doubt it's big enough to have the information we seek, given what I know of what this nation's Muggles think of same-gender relationships. But the London libraries ought to be big enough."

"Ooh, and could we visit Iliana when we do, Daddy?"

"Splendid idea, my darling daughter. I wanted to meet them anyway, but now I can play the concerned father and ask her what her intentions with my daughter are."

"Can we go this afternoon?"

"Ah, well, as to that, both my owls are on deliveries at the moment. Do you know where they live? We could fire-call them if you do. Otherwise we'd have to wait until either Huginn or Muginn get back."

Luna pulled a small bit of parchment out of her pocket. "Iliana wrote down her address for me just before I headed down to the train station. It's right here."

"Well, let's fire-call them, shall we?"

The others didn't know what to do about this Hypatia or her story. Al and Adira were angry with Chandra for not telling them, and spent a lot of time internally yelling at him. He stood calmly before this onslaught and waited for a chance to speak.

When it came, he said, _~What would have me say, Sarcastic Defender and First Among Us? I would never go back on an oath, and what is more, I was unable to do so even if I had wanted to.~_

 _ **What do you mean?**_

 _~Do you remember the part of the story where I mentioned the day/night nature of my memories and abilities?~_

 _ **Yes. What about it?**_

 _~My memories of Aunt Megan were of the night, of the time when we were all asleep normally. I did not remember her at all during Moon At Day, so I was unable to tell you even if I had wanted to. But once her existence came to light, those memories shifted to Moon At Day. There is much that remains hidden in Moon At Night even now, I know that much.~_

 _ **I don't really get that whole business. What's the point of some of your memories being hidden away like that? And now we know about Hypatia, can't she retrieve those for you?**_

 _~It is not her place to do so. Mother guards those. She has her reasons for the wall of memory. I do not know all of them, but one reason is Voldemort, and that is sufficient reason, at least until we can guard our mind.~_

 _ **What about him? He's still a wraith.**_

 _~Yes, but he will not remain so forever. He can read minds. And the connection between us and him means that when he has full power again, he will be able to read our own minds from great distances. This is why Silver Grandfather teaches us to occlude our mind.~_

 _ **WHAT?! Moldyshorts could do that?!**_

 _~Yes.~_

 _ **How do you know?**_

 _~I know because you are not the only Seer among us. Though your visions are of the future, and thus hard to summon, while my own – once unlocked fully – will be the ability to divine some things about the present and possibly the past. Which in some ways will be easier, and in other ways will be much more difficult.~_

 _ **Visions of the present? Like that dream about Moldyshorts? Was that your doing?**_

 _~No. That was the Bridge-Bewixt-Foes that resides in our scar; such visions will be more plentiful when he returns, unless we can occlude our minds first. I mean things like tarot cards, casting bones, reading runes, reading tea leaves, star gazing, even other more esoteric means. Things which do not always speak clearly.~_

 _ **Oh that rubbish of Trelawney's?**_

 _~The Bangled Bug is full of egotism that clouds her inner eye. Most divination tools will work well enough for her if she makes room in her mind by pouring some of that ego away. It is not rubbish because one individual is poor at a thing. If it were, Potions would be rubbish for Angry Vulture Man's flaws and foibles. Besides which, you already know you are a Seer.~_

 _ **Yeah, one just as good as Trelawney, it seems. I had one vision, one! I haven't been able to recreate the experience.**_

 _~Because you too are full of ego. And you need a true teacher.~_

 _ **Yeah I know. I keep meaning to look for one, but I keep getting distracted.**_

 _~When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.~_

 _ **I'm ready NOW!**_

 _~I beg to differ.~_

 _ **This is infuriating! YOU are infuriating! You are the GOD of being infuriating!**_

 _~Namaste.~_ Chandra said, giggling as though he'd told Al a funny joke.

This argument continued for quite a long time, meandering around but finally getting back to the crux of the matter, to the whole business with Hypatia. Which, in the end they decided to just leave her be unless she was needed for something. It was tiresome, but what else could they do?

"Addy!" Sirius called up to them. "You have a fire-call!"

She got up, glad for the distraction from the argument. Checking her watch, she saw they'd been arguing amongst themselves for an entire hour. She went down the stairs and into the drawing room.

"Who is it? Oh, Luna!" she said, suddenly switching forms to Iliana when the redhead jumped into the proverbial driver's seat.

"Hello Iliana! Daddy and I were going to come to London this afternoon to visit the local Muggle library. Would you like to come along? Daddy would like to meet you."

She looked around as if to see if they were alone. Iliana checked out the door, nobody was nearby. "Coast is clear."

"Good. I told Daddy about our date, and our feelings for each other. We're going to the library to get some information on same-gender love for The Talk. Especially where girls are concerned."

Iliana blushed. "Oh, yeah. Cool. Uh, Sirius will be fine with that. I've told him about us as well, and he knew Al wasn't straight. I mean, I'll have to ask Sirius if I can join you, and he'll probably insist on coming with. Though, uh..." She paused. Was Sirius still thinking about the Hypatia issue? How could she express this to Luna?

 _ **# Hey Hypatia? Can I tell Luna about you? She can keep a secret. #**_

At a very high rate of speed, Hypatia shot back, _(Oh yeah sure, why not? Great idea, that. Better yet, call up Rita Skeeter and give her an exclusive interview all about my secrets for_ The Daily Prophet _, sounds like a wonderful idea, I'm sure Draco will understand completely and all will be roses and skipping through a sunlit meadow. It'll be lovely, Voldemort will play us a song on the violin while wearing a great big fake mustache and dressed like one of those guys on the boats in Venice. No wait, FUCK YOU!)_ *sound of a door slamming shut*

 _ **# Jeez louise, what a tetchy git. #**_

To Luna, she said, "Iiiiii'll just go ask Sirius about it, okay?"

"Of course. I'll wait here."

As Iliana left, she heard Luna start to hum to herself.

Sirius was in the kitchen, nursing a butterbeer. When she came in, he looked up at her.

"If Luna wants to come over, pup, that's fine by me. You can let her in."

"Luna and her father want to come to London to go to one of the Muggle libraries, and were wondering if I wanted to come with them. What do you say?"

"A Muggle library? What for?"

"Um... stuff about same-gender relationships. You know, for, er... The Talk."

He blushed. "Ah. Wait, so does that mean The Talk will involve me giving you books to read?"

"Yeah."

"Sure, sounds good. I'll come with you. We'll have to take public transit, though; not enough room on the motorbike, and we've only got the one."

"I thought as much. Were you still thinking about Hypatia's story?"

"Yes. I could use a break, though, if my brain will let me. I suspect you feel the same way. It's a hell of a thing, hearing all that."

"Tell me about it. One day a vague suspicion, the next day years worth of activity laid out like that."

"You gonna tell any of your friends about her?"

"No. I asked Hypatia about it and her response was... unpleasant."

"I don't doubt it. Well, let's not keep them waiting. Those floors are hard on the knees, even if you kneel on the hearth rug."

Sirius drained the rest of his butterbeer and left the bottle on the table, getting up to lead Iliana back to the drawing room.

When Luna and her father came in through the Floo, Iliana and Sirius got to see what they were planning to wear into Muggle London. They were dressed like a pair of hippies. Luna had on a very colorful tie-die dress with the colors in a spiral pattern, and was wearing a flower crown on her head, and a pair of flower bracelets on her wrists. For shoes, she had on moccasins. Her father had on white bell-bottom pants, a white v-neck shirt with a pattern stitched into the collar, a fringed vest of brown leather, purple granny glasses, and something similar to a sweat band or a hair band on his head. Instead of moccasins, he had on go-go boots. At least, Iliana _thought_ he was wearing go-go boots; it was hard to tell, as they were mostly covered by his bell-bottoms.

"Groovy, man," Sirius said, grinning.

Xeno chuckled. "Yes, a bit out of date, but I believe the Muggles call it 'retro.'"

"At least it's stylistically consistent," Iliana said. "Most wizards and witches seem to forget in their older age how to dress like Muggles, and wear weird mixes like a kilt with a poncho."

"Yes, I believe it to be the fault of the yobnogs, you know," Xeno said. "Yobnogs hate stylistically consistent clothing in wizards because they like us to stand out, and so they cause people to forget how to blend in. But not us, we're protected. In this case, by the simple expedient of standing out as much as possible on our own without 'help' from the yobnogs."

Iliana grinned and turned to Luna. "Love your dress. It's very colorful. Very _you._ "

Luna curtsied. "Thank you, Iliana. You look good as well."

Iliana looked down at her clothes, and was alarmed to find she had on a dress with a pattern of fish on it. Not colorful, living fish, but dead gray ones, very ugly indeed. She immediately knew who to blame.

"Um, I think someone is angry at me. I'll just go change now, be right back."

She ran upstairs, internally yelling impotently at the annoyingly quiet Hypatia as she went into the room, pulled off the ugly fish dress, and pulled on another with pink hearts on a sky-blue background, then ran back downstairs.

"Aww," Luna said. "I liked the dead fish dress. It made quite the statement."

"Yeah, well I didn't like it."

"So, I take it you're Iliana?" Xeno asked, holding out his hand for her to shake.

She took it. "Yes, that's me."

"Wonderful to finally meet you. Luna has told me so much about you all. Let's see, there's also Adira – formerly, well, I won't say the dead name, even if it's famous. Then Alastair, correct? Good. Um... Chandra? Excellent. Then she recently met Tier. Am I missing anyone?"

"Zoey and Avani Maznah, who is also known as Mother."

"Ah yes, I remember Zoey now. Six year old, black hair, hetero-chromatic eyes? Good. I don't remember Mother, though."

"Ah, well She never comes Out. So far She has been some kind of teacher for Chandra, and seems to be able to control who's Out when She chooses to exercise that ability. Oh yeah, and She acts like an on-site psychiatrist."

"Psychiatrist? That's the Muggle Mind Healing, isn't it?"

"One of two branches, yes. Psychiatrists deal more with ailments caused by medical problems in the brain, like chemical imbalances, brain damage, that sort of thing. Psychologists are basically professional counselors or therapists. I might be oversimplifying things, but I don't really understand the difference that well myself. Except I don't think psychologists can prescribe medicines."

"Ah. Well anyway, as much fun as it would be to chat here, we should all get going. It's been a while since I've been in Muggle London, Mr. Black; can you tell me what we do?"

"Please call me Sirius. I have issues with my father, and he was Mr. Black."

"My apologies, my dear man, 'Sirius' it is, then. And when we're out in Muggle London, you can call me Phil. Not many Muggles named Xenophilius, after all."

"True," Sirius said. "Good thinking."

'Phil' pulled a hat from a pocket that must have been magically expanded; the hat was shaped almost like the hat Indiana Jones wore, but it didn't have the creases or divots, and was very crudely stitched from suede. A suede cord trailed from the back of it when he put it on, which had colorful glass beads strung on it. He reached in his pocket again and pulled out a large brown suede jacket as well. He pulled it on and smiled.

Reaching into a pocket on her dress, Luna pulled out a rainbow-colored knitted slouchy beanie hat and put it on. Then she pulled out a rainbow-patterned jacket that looked like it was made by sewing strips of fabric together the way you might do for a quilt, and put it on.

"It's chilly out there, you know," Xeno said.

"Oh yeah, good point," Iliana said.

She went to the coat rack and put her normal store-bought Muggle jacket on, a nice dark blue color. Sirius pulled on a black leather duster instead of his shorter leather jacket, since they weren't going to be on the motorbike.

"We're going to make an interesting group on the underground," Iliana said, taking in their four very different styles.

"Well good," Xeno said. "Everyone could use a nudge to get their minds open a little bit."

They did indeed get lots of strange looks on the underground. Iliana didn't mind at all, it was good to get stared at for something other than being famous or being thought insane for once. The four of them went to the nearest library and perused the books. When they had a number of useful titles about the realities of same-sex romance decided on, they wrote them down to find in Muggle bookstores later, since none of them had library cards.

After lunch, where they had great fun introducing the Lovegoods to pizza for the first time in their lives, they hunted around several bookstores for the titles they wanted and the adults used their wands to send their purchases home. Then, just for fun, they went to a cinema to take in a movie. Mr. Lovegood was awed and fascinated by the experience, as was Luna, and both he and Luna had some interesting reactions to it. Even though it was just a Disney movie, there were several parts where Luna jumped and shrieked in alarm – including when something came toward the audience, making her think it was going to leap out of the screen – or other parts where Luna cried during parts that weren't even sad, or sometimes did both. Iliana felt bad for her, but held her close to comfort her.

Luna wasn't the only one reacting oddly to the movie. Mr. Lovegood jumped in the same places she did, though he didn't usually shout or shriek. A couple times he let out an accidental expletive that had other parents glaring at him in disgust. But by far the funniest moment, for Iliana, was when Mr. Lovegood jumped so hard that his entire bucket of popcorn went flying halfway across the theater and he had to go buy another one to replace it.

Sirius, on the other hand, had apparently been to movies before at some point in the past, and could've been a Muggle, as his reactions were much more normal. Still, he wasn't without his flaws; a great many people were alarmed by his sudden loud barks of laughter, he occasionally cried quietly at touching scenes, and several times he shouted stuff at the screen during tense moments.

"That was an experience," Luna said when they got out of the theater. "A largely good one, I think, despite all the frights and crying."

"Yeah, now that I think about it," Iliana replied, "I think I read somewhere that the first Muggles to see a movie in a theater panicked and ran screaming from the theater when a train came toward the audience on the screen; they thought it was real. So it makes sense you two reacted the way you did."

"Oh, I'm glad to know it wasn't just us," Luna said.

"I'm just glad we had the foresight to pick a tame Disney movie, instead of an action film or horror."

"Yeah, we wouldn't want Luna or Phil to die of fright or disapparate in front of a bunch of Muggles."

"Yes, I don't think I want to ever see a horror movie," Luna said. "I don't think I could handle it."

She was having so much fun that day, she later thought she should've expected it would go slightly sour. On the way back to Sirius's flat, they'd stopped at an ice-cream shop for a pick-me-up after the drama of the movies, and in a far corner she spotted a horribly familiar face. Large jowls, walrus mustache: it was Uncle Vernon. And sitting next to him, their backs turned but unmistakable, were the other two Dursleys, Petunia and Dudley. Something dropped in the pit of her stomach, and she started to have a panic attack. She felt weak and shaky, her fingers going numb, and she was sweating and felt lost.

"Iliana, what's wrong?" Luna asked, looking worried for Iliana.

Iliana couldn't move or speak. Luna, Sirius, and Mr. Lovegood all turned to face the direction she was looking. Mr. Lovegood didn't understand, but Sirius and Luna did.

"Iliana, they won't recognize you. You're you, not Adira. And they might not even recognize Adira, either," Luna said in a whisper.

"Yes," Sirius whispered back, "but she looks like Lily. If Petunia sees her, it'll be worse than seeing Adira."

"What do we do? If we get up and try to get her somewhere else, they might spot us."

"They might look over here at any time and spot us then."

"I have an idea," Luna said, and slipped off her chair in a crouch.

Sirius and Mr. Lovegood watched her until she got lost in the crowd of the chairs and tables. After waiting for a minute or two for something to happen, they heard a crash in the opposite direction. All eyes went there, even the eyes of the Dursleys.

"Quick, come with me, pup. Phil, you pay for us."

Sirius quickly led Iliana out the door, though it was more accurate to say he was dragging along someone who could barely breathe or move. As they passed the till, Sirius said, "My friend Phil will pay for us. It's an emergency."

Iliana was still not improved when Sirius pulled her into an alley and – after checking for cameras with a handy spell he'd learned once – Disillusioned Iliana. Then he carefully pulled her a bit deeper into the narrow alley, checked they weren't being seen, and disapparated with her to the Leaky Cauldron.

"Tom, please get my god-daughter somewhere she can lay down for a bit, she's having a bit of a panic attack."

"Of courth, Thiriuth," the toothless old landlord said. "Thith way, pleath."

"Thank you, Tom," Sirius said when he got her onto a sofa. "And is there any way you could fetch me a Calming Draft?"

"I've got one here, Thiriuth, I picked it up from behind the bar as thoon ath you thaid what you needed."

He handed Sirius the potion, and he carefully tipped it down Iliana's throat. She shuddered and relaxed, then burst into tears.

"Wow, mutht need thumthing thtronger. I'll be right back."

Iliana was still crying when Luna and Xeno showed up.

"Thought you might come here, Sirius," Xeno said. "It's where I'd go, if I was with others and had to get away for my Luna. Which has happened before, actually."

Luna went over to Iliana and held her close. Iliana cried into Luna's shoulder. Luna ran her fingers through Iliana's hair and started to hum what sounded like a lullabye.

"I brought her thum withkey. Watered down of courth, but ought to help all the thame."

"Thank you, Tom. Not sure she'll be using it, but thanks all the same."

"You're welcome, Thiriuth."

After crying for a few more minutes, Iliana ran out of tears and moved on to sniffles and hiccups, then finally just went very quiet, looking miserable.

"I'd... forgotten."

"Forgotten what, pup?"

"That they live near London. That they come here sometimes. Why did they have to ruin our day out?"

 _ **If we see them again, I hope we can change to Adira's old form and give them a good scare, run at them with our wand out, screaming nonsense words!**_

Iliana giggled.

"What's funny?" Sirius asked.

"Al said next time we should become Adira's old form and run at them with our wand out, screaming nonsense words."

Sirius barked with laughter. Luna burst into one of her giggle fits. Xeno watched her for a while, but it didn't stop; in fact, since they weren't at school and were in a private room, Luna let loose laughing hard as she could. Of course, this set Iliana off laughing til she fell over and started to wheeze.

"Oh my," Xeno said, heading for the door a few minutes into her giggle fit. "I'd better go get a Calming Draft from Tom."

When Iliana stopped laughing and Xeno got Luna to stop doing more than sporadic short bursts of giggles by getting the Calming Draft down her throat, Iliana turned to Luna.

"What was that song you were humming?"

"An old lullabye my mum used to sing to me. It's called 'Hippogriffs At Midnight.' I don't remember the words, or I'd have sung it."

"Thank you, Luna. And you, Sirius. All of you, really. I don't know what I'd have done if I'd had to be accosted by Petunia for wearing her dead sister's face. It's bad enough Adira used to look like James. Still kinda does, in fact."

"Yes, pup, I rather suspect the Ministry would have had to get involved in that case, probably by sending an Obliviator squad. Petunia would go completely mental otherwise."

Iliana shuddered at the thought.

The rest of the Easter holidays went by much more normally. There were a lot of visits to the flat by Luna, and a couple times Iliana visited Luna at her chess-rook shaped house, where she got to see a lot of Luna's very excellent art, Xeno's magical printing press, and their dirigible plums. But whenever Luna wasn't around, they switched back to Adira, so she could spend time with her godfather before going back to school.

They didn't hear anything from Hypatia, though on the day before the trip back to school, they found she'd done all their homework for them, which they thought was very nice of her until Hedwig arrived with a Howler from her, telling them in words that filled the entire flat that she hadn't done it to be nice and she hated the lot of them. Their ears were still ringing hours later.

Endnotes: Ah, a little bit of mutual hurt/comfort there between Iliana and Luna. Kinda sweet. :)

Hypatia's story, out in full!

I don't think I'll be shipping Draco and Hypatia. Even if he asked her out, she would likely refuse. And he's not likely to ask while he thinks she's a closeted trans girl; he'd want to wait until she came out. Anyway, they're just friends. Also, he's going to find out the truth about her eventually. Even if they remain friends after that, any hope of them being more than friends that might have been there would be obliterated at that point.

Also, we're getting way out of the zone of similarity between the Potter collective and mine. None of us have the kind of powers either Hypatia or Avani / Mother show in this chapter, or the one before it. Like Chandra, Hypatia is completely unlike anything in our own collective.

I'm waiting to see if anyone "gets" the "namaste" joke that Chandra made in this chapter. :)

I only noticed after finishing up proofreading this chapter that Hypatia's "Sleepwalker Arc" started with an Iliana/Luna date, and ended with another Iliana/Luna date. I swear I did not do that on purpose. :)

One last thing, as a "just in case" and because Google is being a pain: Can anyone tell me what was the motorcycle license age in the UK in 1995? What about motor _scooter_ age, if different?


	38. I Solemnly Swear I Am Up To No Good

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 38"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-eight: I Solemnly Swear I Am Up To No Good**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _Zoey_ _, #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and between hashtags/pound signs**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__

 _%_ _ _Mother AKA Avani Maznah, %__ _and_ _ _"Hypatia/Megan."__

 _ **Note 4:**_ _All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!_

 **Note 5:** Because of the heaviness of the last couple chapters, here's a fun one I've been wanting to do for a long time now: a chapter centered pretty much entirely around Zoey Potter, and her hi-jinks! It doesn't start out with her, but it will get there soon enough and most of it will be centered around her.

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

On the way back to school after the holidays, Alastair managed to have a conversation with Hypatia that didn't end in howlers or someone storming off. It started when he directed a thought at her about the rituals mentioned in Chandra's telling of her story.

 _ **See what I don't get is, well, take that one where you get pain in your arms to take someone's magic away for a time. Why don't we just do that to Moldyshorts and kill him while he's powerless?**_

There was a great, big, long-suffering sigh that came out of their shared mouth.

 _(Okay, I'll try to use small words so you understand. First of all, even minor rituals have risks. It's not always a case of having the arithmancy right. Sometimes things just happen to screw rituals up. Let's take a small example: let's say you do a ritual for slightly enhanced senses. Right, so even little rituals require some kind of words at the very least. Some you can do in your head, others you have to say aloud. Let's imagine you say the word slightly wrong or sneeze at the wrong time and suddenly either you go blind or you're overwhelmed by ridiculously powerful senses and feel like you're dying._

 _(Then you get into the higher level rituals, and those often require stuff like symbols written on the floor, or carved into your arm, or they require other ingredients like the eyeball of a virgin goat or something. Or tears of a mermaid, occamy blood, or whatnot. Some of those things are not easy to get, and a lot of those rituals that call for those things take some time to do, enough time that your enemy can either hex you while you're setting things up or you have to do them far away from the target. And other rituals can only be done on certain days, like during a total solar eclipse, for an example._

 _(Then too, there's a connection component. Some small rituals just require eye contact with the victim, but larger ones usually require stuff like body parts of the victim. The 'pain in your arms to take away someone's magic' one requires fresh blood of the victim. Hair won't work, hair is dead. Magic is life, so you need a symbol of their life like their blood. It would be kinda hard to get Voldemort's blood._

 _(Of course, there_ _ **are**_ _area-effect rituals, but those are dangerous in their own ways. Like, for instance, the fact they don't discriminate and you can't really just pick and choose who in the area is affected. Plus they're extremely unstable and the consequences tend to be deadly if they go wrong. This kind of thing is why ritual magic is considered a Dark Art._

 _(And then of course, for someone sufficiently powerful, they can just block the ritual if they know it's coming. Most people couldn't, but someone like Dumbledore or a full-powered Voldemort could probably do it. And that ritual you mentioned is definitely one of those 'they will see it coming' ones. Among other things, in the last minute or two of the ritual, they'll be able to feel it no matter where in the country they are. Even if they couldn't, if you were, say, in a duel with them and managed to find cover to do the ritual, if they saw you or heard the chanting or had a sneaking suspicion, that wouldn't be good for you. Of course, some rituals can be started ahead of time to make them more battle-ready, but that has its issues too._

 _(More importantly, the kind of pain we're talking about in that spell is along the lines of the cruciatus curse. Kinda hard to kill someone when you can't use your wand or your arms. And just like the cruciatus curse, it tends to have lingering side effects like nerve damage.)_

 _ **Yes, but we could do the ritual and have an Auror kill Voldemort while he's powerless.**_

 _(Even assuming you caught him without his Death Eaters around to help him, even assuming you could get the blood or whatever and had cover to do the ritual, even assuming all appears to go well and you get the ritual out somehow and he doesn't block it, there's still a better than 50% chance of the ritual going horribly wrong and maybe killing someone or something like that. So this is all largely academic for me so far. Sure, some of these little rituals have proven useful, but even with my skills at maths, the heavier-duty rituals are extremely dangerous. Like, I don't know what rituals Voldemort used to make his horcruxes, but my guess is that if he ever comes back, he's gonna look like the offspring of Uncle Fester and a snake (that then died for an hour and was brought back), and given he's working with fragments of his soul, which he's done who knows how many times, I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough accumulated ritual backlash where he's going to be a lot more emotionally unstable than he was prior to his horcruxes, and the emotions he has are likely going to be incredibly intense. Also it's likely his ability to reason will be affected as well._

 _(The danger of ritual backlash is, incidentally, the bulk of the reason I've been working on my sacrifice array. Sure, the array lends it a bit more instability in the sense that a failure is more likely, but it cuts out much more risk than it adds so that the failure mode isn't as bad, and has the added benefit – to us – of being something the majority of people can't do without the help of a computer._

 _(One last point: Please note the fact that Voldemort, a power-mad serial killer who thinks he's the greatest wizard since Merlin, rarely ever seemed to use ritual magic when he was strong. Sure, he had to use them for the horcruxes, but mostly he uses his wand. Because he knows, on some level, that it's risky and he only wants to risk it for really special things.)_

 _ **If it's so risky, why do you use it as much as you have?**_

 _(Because those are tiny little things, with very little risk, and anyway I only use ritual magic for stuff that I can't use a wand for. With the exception of experiments, of course.)_

 _ **Ah. Okay. I think I understand now.**_

 _(Good. Now buzz off.)_

Their first week back at school after Easter went much like normal, alternating forms among the days and doing schoolwork. Of course, in the quiet moments, they thought about Hypatia. They'd told Ron and Hermione they'd been mistaken about the sleepwalker, that they'd just been imagining things. Neither of them seemed very convinced, but they at least got the message that they didn't want to talk about it, and honored that desire.

On Friday at dinner, Luna came over and stood beside Iliana, wringing her hands and looking conflicted about something.

"What is it, Luna?" Iliana asked.

Luna opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. So she signed instead. Luckily, she'd taught Tier the wizarding sign language.

 _{'More of my things have gone missing. I didn't want to bother you about it but one of the things that went missing is my butterbeer cork necklace,'}_ Tier translated. _{'I need that necklace. It keeps the nargles away.'}_

The amount of anxiety coming off Luna in waves when she related this problem was so high that Iliana was getting a headache from it.

"We find your necklace, Luna," Tier signed with the sign language interpreter device switched on. "We feel it important to you. We find it now. Where you last see necklace?"

She signed frantically, her anxiety increasing, and Tier translated. _{'Took it off before shower. Forgot to put it in trunk. I keep forgetting to put things in trunk, so they keep going missing. I need the necklace. I need it.'}_

"We find it, Luna," Tier replied.

"Come here, Luna. Sit down," Iliana said. She didn't know why the necklace was that important to Luna, but she didn't need to know; it was, and that's what mattered. She was so upset she wasn't able to talk, even. Which is something she recognized; it happened to Javier at times.

Luna sat down next to Iliana and leaned into her, her eyes watering. Luna started touching the wood of the table, stroking it, but stopped soon, as it seemed to make her worse.

"Okay, now I have to ask; what's so important about this necklace? Why can't you make another one?"

Luna started signing while shaking so badly that Iliana had to stroke Luna's cheek to get her to calm down enough to be understood when she signed.

 _{'Loud. So loud. People loud. So many. So many feelings. So much noise. Nargles make noise worse. Necklace drives nargles away, makes noise less.'}_

Iliana had a hypothesis and decided to take the risk of testing it.

"Dobby!"

The little elf appeared behind Iliana, the sudden loud CRACK making Luna start to really lose control. She was putting in a visibly strong effort to keep herself under control, but Iliana could feel the control slipping.

"Please bring us a couple used butterbeer corks, just the corks. As soon as possible."

"Yes, Iliana!" Dobby said, disapparating again. Luna's control slipped further, and she was digging her face into Iliana's shoulder to hide the tears. While she did that, Iliana used her wand to cast a silencing charm on Luna's ears to keep some of the noise out.

"NO! STOP!" Luna shouted, and Iliana took down the spell.

"What's the matter?"

"Not that noise. Not that noise. Not that noise."

 _ **I suspect the calm energy we normally associate with Luna is a coping mechanism of some sort. Some of the things she's saying... I think she's an empath, too. It would explain why she knew about empaths already when we met her,**_ Al said in their head.

"It's okay. What do you need?"

"Not that noise. Not that noise. Not that noise."

"Ron, would you go ask McGonagall if you can use her fire to fire-call Luna's father for help? Hermione, go see if Flitwick knows about anything that can help."

Her two friends nodded and hustled out of the room fast as they could. She looked over to the Slytherin table, ignoring Malfoy and his cronies making fun of Luna, and found Javier. He was looking at Draco with a glare on his face. To get his attention, she used wandless magic to pull on his robes. It wasn't easy without use of her hands, but she managed it enough that he turned around and spotted her. She gestured at Luna and then him with her head. Nodding, he got up and came over.

"What's the matter?" Javier asked.

"I don't know. She came over, tried speaking, had to sign instead. Told us her butterbeer cork necklace was missing, then she started freaking out. She's repeating the same three words over and over again now: 'not that noise.'"

"What else did she say?"

Iliana related Luna's message to Javier. When she was done, he nodded. "The necklace must be a stim. Probably helps her cope. You were right to-"

CRACK!

Luna burst into loud tears and Dobby looked concerned. Javier was on the ground, his hat over his eyes and tangled in his own robes.

"Corks please, Dobby!"

"Oh! Yes! Here you is, Miss."

She took the corks from Dobby and pressed them into Luna's hands. "They're not your necklace, but maybe they'll help until we can find it?"

They did. She stopped crying, just as Dumbledore came over. Iliana looked up in surprise at him.

"Perhaps you should take Miss Lovegood somewhere quiet, away from people? That will probably help more than the corks," he said.

"Um. Yeah, great idea. Except I don't know how to get her to move."

He smiled and his eyes twinkled at her. "Don't you? I seem to recall Professor McGonagall told me of a charm you two used recently that might help. I will tell Mr. Weasley and Miss Granger where you've gone."

"But where do I take her?"

"I suggest a certain room on the 7th floor, across from a certain tapestry."

"You know about that, then?"

"Yes. Now hurry, before she gets worse."

"Right."

Iliana cast a Featherlight Charm on Luna, and picked her up like she weighed nothing, leaving the Great Hall as fast as she dared. She took every shortcut she knew through the school to get them to the Room of Requirement quickly as she could.

 _ **#**_ _ **I need a place where a possibly autistic empath can calm down,**_ _ **#**_ she thought three times as she walked past the place where the Room was.

On the third time past, she looked, and a door had appeared. She approached the door and it opened on its own, swinging inward, then closing once they were inside. Inside the room were loads of huge squishy pillow-like poufs, low and soft lighting, and piles of what looked like unusual little hand-held toys in boxes. Iliana set Luna down on the nearest pouf and canceled the Featherlight Charm.

As soon as she lay Luna down, a magical phonograph player appeared beside her and started playing odd music. It was light and airy and sounded like magic, and a woman started singing about fairies, but it sounded more like the Muggle idea of fairies than the wizarding idea of them.

After several minutes, Luna sat up slowly and pulled a box of the odd toys toward her. She started picking through them but didn't seem to care for any of them. When she pushed the box aside, a lap harp appeared, as well as a set of ten little bits of metal that looked like they'd fit on the ends of someone's fingers. Smiling, Luna put the harp in her lap, put the bits of metal on the ends of her fingers, and started to play it. It turned out the metal bits were finger picks for the harp's strings. The harp music fit in so well with the music the phonograph was playing that it couldn't have been a coincidence.

Iliana sat there, enraptured by the music, for how long she didn't know, but Ron and Hermione came in at last and handed Iliana a list that Xenophilius had given them, of things that would help Luna. But Luna looked to be recovering with the help of the Room of Requirement.

When she stopped playing the harp and set it down, turning off the phonograph player, she smiled.

"Thank you for your help, Iliana. I feel much better now. And thank you for the butterbeer corks. They'll help me until you can find my necklace." She sighed. "I don't know what I was thinking, taking it off. The corks are waterproof. A wrackspurt must have flown into my ear."

"You're welcome, Luna. You helped me when I had my breakdown, and even if you hadn't, I'd still do this for you."

"Wait, you had a breakdown?" Ron asked. "When was this?"

Looking to Luna for permission first in case it might set Luna off, when Luna smiled and nodded, she turned back to the two of them and told them about spotting the Dursleys over the Easter holidays. They reacted pretty much as she'd expected them to: Ron cursing and offering lame condolences before getting awkward, Hermione very shocked and teary, touching Iliana's shoulder in solidarity.

The four of them talked, and they found out from Luna that her father had known for some time that she was very strange, moreso even than Xeno could cope with without help, and had taken her to St. Mungo's to find out what it could be. They had been flummoxed, but one young man, a Healer Young, had referred them to a Muggle psychiatrist, where she'd gotten a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome. So had her father, in fact.

"So two of the people in your body are dating people with this Asperger's thing? Odd sort of coincidence, that."

"Maybe not so much. Being a collective, we're not exactly a standard-issue brain type ourselves. Perhaps we're just drawn to other unusual minds."

"Yes, that makes sense," Luna said. "Of course, I have also been wondering about Chandra. I think he might be like me. He might have Asperger's Syndrome. Others have pointed out similarities between the two of us. He talks strangely, he thinks strangely, he behaves strangely. You'd know better than I, of course. But it's something to ponder."

"That's a fair point. He and Hy- er, yeah, he might have that, it makes sense."

Hermione was looking at her with a very suspicious look on her face. The slip-up had not gone unnoticed. Iliana heard cursing in the back of her mind.

After hanging out for another hour, they went back to their own common rooms for the night.

Zoey was the one Out the next day, and after last night – and seeing Luna over at the Ravenclaw table looking more stressed than usual – she decided she needed to find Luna's missing stuff. So after breakfast, she ran off and headed for Ravenclaw tower.

On the way, though, she nearly ran into Peeves, and had to duck out of the way. She ended up slightly not where she was supposed to be, near the Room of Requirement. It was only then that she realized she wasn't really sure yet what to do. Taking advantage of her location, she thought about the problem as she walked past the Room three times.

When the door appeared, she opened it up, expecting to find all of Luna's missing things right there in a neat pile, only...

"WOAH!"

The room she'd entered was _enormous_. It was bigger than the Great Hall, probably twice as big if not bigger. And it was littered, over the entire floor except for some paths cleared in the mess, with all sorts of junk. Along with old and mostly broken furniture, there were piles of old books, teetering towers of contraband like dead or dying Fanged Frisbees and so on, as well as cauldrons full of the remains of ruined potions, and all sorts of other junk.

"COOL! This place is full of neat stuff!"

She ran ahead, determined to dig through everything, but several of the others froze her in mid-step, warning her that it was potentially dangerous in here. There was no knowing what kinds of dark and/or dangerous items were in here. They tried to get her to leave, but she refused.

Knowing She couldn't get Zoey to budge, Avani – Mother – instead took control of her wand arm, got out the holly wand, and carefully cast a spell.

" _Expecto patronum!_ "

A bright silver fox burst out of the wand, only it wasn't a normal fox: it was twice the size of a normal fox, and it had _three_ tails. Avani gave it a message to bring Professor McGonagall, and it sped off.

A few minutes later, a confused McGonagall came in and stared in awe at the room.

"Where... where _are_ we, Miss Potter?"

"Room of Requirement. It becomes whatever someone needs if they think about what they need while walking three times past the blank wall that the entrance appears in. But this is a... a specific sub-room of the Room of Requirement. Hmm... I think I'm gonna call it The Room of Lost Things."

"Whoever sent the patronus was right to send for me, this room is full of dangerous items. You should not be here. We need to bring in some aurors."

"Do you really think that's wise with Tom The Riddler trying to come back? Who knows what kinda stuff he could use from here."

"I doubt they'd be selling anything dangerous, Miss Potter. How did you find this place, anyway?"

She explained how she'd gotten in as succinctly as possible.

"Well, if it's gone undiscovered all this time, I don't see how it could hurt to leave it. We'll keep a discreet eye on the place, Miss Potter. But we should probably leave now. And you are not to go back into the Room of Lost Things, understood?"

"Yes, Professor."

She pulled Zoey along, and the young girl looked very disappointed at not being able to explore such a fascinating place, but didn't fight it. She waved sadly at the door when it turned back into a wall.

"Whose patronus was that, anyway? I don't recall ever seeing it before."

"It was Mother's patronus. That was the first any of us have seen of it."

"Well it's fascinating. There are now two of you– well, I suppose three, actually – with magical creatures for patronuses, in that case."

"Three?"

"Yes. One of you had a three-headed snake for a patronus, that's a magical creature called a Runespoor."

"That's Al's!"

"I see. Then there's that peculiar dragon of Iliana's. And now this Mother has a kitsune for a patronus."

Zoey looked confused. "What's a kit-soon-eh?"

"A kitsune is a Japanese magical creature. Well, it's a bit confusing, really, whether they're creatures or beings, because most of them are very intelligent three-tailed foxes, but then some of them become so powerful that they become humanoid. The more tails a kitsune has, the more powerful they are. The most that's been confirmed to be seen is a seven-tailed kitsune, who by that point looked like a beautiful human woman except for her tails and fox ears, and she was a powerful Lady in control of an entire... province? Prefecture? I'm not sure what the term was back then, but she was Lady of a castle, several large towns, and many villages before the European invaders started coming in. Regrettably, several wizards were among them, and killed her, after several months of waging war on her. The final battle was six powerful wizards versus the one seven-tailed kitsune, and it took them _five hours_ to bring her down.

"Anyway... there have also been rumors for centuries of kitsune with _nine_ tails. I shudder to think how much of a fight one of _those_ would give people. I sincerely hope I never have to find out. But you need to run along now, Miss Potter. Don't go back to that room."

"I won't. I actually had other plans before getting sidetracked. But now I'm back on track."

McGonagall looked like she was trying to decide if she wanted to know what Zoey's plans were or not. She finally decided she didn't want to know, and shooed the girl away.

Zoey took some time to wander around trying to throw McGonagall or anyone else who might be watching off the scent, but not too obviously, for she really didn't plan to go back there. As strong as the temptation to dig through all that stuff had been, it was mostly gone now that she wasn't looking right at the thing.

No, she had other plans, and as a result ended up outside the Ravenclaw dorm entrance.

The door knocker said, "I have no substance and yet I can kill, I am nowhere but everywhere; swim in my expanse unprotected and you'll freeze to death while your body burns. Take refuge in a container you can live in, and your might cook to death from your own body heat. What am I?"

"Outer space. Or the void, whatever wizards call it."

"Correct," the knocker responded, and opened the door.

Zoey Disillusioned herself, walking invisible into the room. Being a weekend, most students were outside or in the library, and the common room had only two Ravenclaws in it, on opposite sides of the room. Zoey sneaked by them both and went up to the girl's dormitories into Luna's room. Using her wand, she used _Accio_ to summon Luna's things from a list she'd written down. One by one, most of them came to her and she set them down on Luna's bed, except for the butterbeer cork necklace, which she put around her neck after Disillusioning it first. A couple things she summoned were locked and couldn't get out, so she hunted them down and liberated them from the trunks of the bullies, leaving behind a surprise: dungbombs bewitched to go off when the bullies opened their trunks again.

Then she took advantage of the fact she was one of the only people who could get into Luna's trunk, and opened it, taking everything out. She then cast anti-theft charms on all of Luna's stuff (which would make it so anyone but Luna or the Potters touching those things would shock the would-be thief bad enough to knock them over but not seriously injure them), putting everything back in the trunk and making sure it was locked. She could tell Luna about this later when she found her to return the butterbeer cork necklace.

Then she used another nifty spell she'd read recently to find who had stolen the objects on the list of things she'd summoned, and left the same bewitched dungbombs in their trunks as well; except she didn't do that to the bullies in Luna's dorm, in case the stink upset Luna. She'd thought about doing something else instead to them, but in the end decided not to. Instead, she went into some other dorms – boys' as well as girls' – and put more dungbombs in, to make it look more like a random dungbomb attack, a prank with no real pattern to it. She didn't want anyone to think Luna had done it. But if she found they were thinking that anyway, she'd confess she had done it.

She spent the next few hours searching the castle and then the grounds for Luna. She wasn't in the Great Hall, or at Hagrid's, or in the greenhouses, or the library, or anywhere else she could think of to look. Finally, she got the Marauder's Map out and searched it, but in the confusing mass she couldn't find her there either.

Annoyed, she put her wand on the Map and said, "Show me Luna Lovegood."

Three concentric circles moved from part of the Map like ripples on a pond, moving out and then back in again, pointing out Luna. She was in the Forbidden Forest. Javier was with her for some reason.

"Figgers," Zoey said, clearing the Map and putting it in her pocket. "Note to self: get one of those sets of mirror thingies for Luna and us."

Disillusioning herself again, she sneaked out of the castle and into the Forbidden Forest. It didn't take her long to find Luna and Javier, they were in a small clearing in the forest feeding chunks of meat to thestrals. Javier looked a bit freaked out, but Luna looked serene.

Undoing the Disillusionment Charm, Zoey said, "Boo!"

Javier jumped, dropping the meat he'd been feeding the thestral fawn. It reached its head down and began eating the dropped meat, and Javier pulled away, washing his hand with his wand.

"You startled me, er... who are you?"

"Zoey Potter."

"Oh yes, right. Well you startled me, and you shouldn't startle people who are feeding invisible creatures that eat meat."

"So you can't see 'em?"

"No. You can?"

"Iliana killed Professor Quirrell in our first year. He up and died right in front of us. So yeah, we can see 'em. Can I help feed the bony horsies?"

"Sure, you can have what's left of the meat Luna gave me. She's... off in her own world right now."

"I can still hear you, though," Luna said. "Welcome, Zoey. I see you found the necklace that went missing."

"Yeah, I found the rest of your stuff, too. It's all back in your trunk, with anti-theft charms on it all in case you forget to put anything back again."

"Thank you. That should deter most of the thieves."

"Only 'most' of them?" Zoey said, picking up some of the meat and feeding another fawn.

"Well yes, some of the more determined thieves might be thwarted once by that ploy, but they'll not be caught by the same trick twice. They'll remove the charm the second time."

"If they do that, I'll find them and turn them into turtles."

"I'd rather you didn't do that. Just bringing me my lost things will suffice."

Zoey didn't know what to say, so she made an indistinct noise instead.

"Do you ever fly them, Luna? The thestrals, I mean," Zoey said.

"Oh no, I haven't yet. Hagrid only lets me feed them."

"Where _is_ Hagrid? If he's letting you feed the thestrals, shouldn't he be here with you?"

"He went to talk with the centaurs about something," Javier said.

Zoey nodded. "And why're you here, Javier?"

He shrugged. "Luna and I are friends. Have been for a while now. Now I have two friends, instead of just one."

"But we're a collective, loads of different people."

"Yes, I know that. But I'm only really friends with Alastair and Luna. Adira and I have something of an awkward acquaintance with each other at best, I don't know Iliana worth a darn, I've only just met you, and I don't really know any of the others. From the sound of things, I think Chandra and I would get along with each other, but I haven't really met him yet."

"I'll make sure to have him introduce himself, then."

Javier smiled. "I'd like that."

When all the meat was gone, they continued to pet the thestrals, but most of them started wandering off before long, leaving the three humans alone just in time for Hagrid to return.

"Ah, yeh lot all done then? Oh, hi there Zoey."

"Hello Hagrid!" Zoey said, waving. She suppressed the urge to run at him and hug him, since he was carrying his crossbow.

"Well, if the thestrals are scarperin', best get on outta the forest now."

The three of them followed him as he left the forest and into his hut. He un-loaded his crossbow and put it back in place.

"Care fer a cuppa?"

"Sounds lovely, Hagrid," Luna said.

"Do you have any herbal tea, Hagrid?" Javier asked. "I'm feeling a little jittery. Need something to soothe my nerves."

"Ya, I got some chamomille and lavender herbal tea. It's in teabags, though."

"That's fine. I prefer teabags anyway. I can't stand the little bits floating around."

"You and Al both," Zoey said. "Oh, here's your necklace, Luna."

She handed Luna the butterbeer cork necklace. Luna held it in one hand a few minutes and closed her eyes, holding the other hand above it, palm down, while Hagrid made the tea. The necklace started to glow orange.

"Whatcha doin'?" Zoey asked curiously.

"I reckon she's cleansing its energy. No telling where it's been before you had it."

"Huh? What's that mean?"

"Oh, it might have some bad energy on it from the person who took it. She can't let that energy stay there. It's an empath thing, I think."

"That's something you can do? Neat. I don't think we've ever tried that. I wonder if we could learn. Might help Chandra with his eating problem."

"Eatin' problem?" Hagrid asked, settling into his seat. "Whadda yeh mean?"

"He can't eat meat, because he can feel the animal's suffering."

"Oh."

Luna finally opened her eyes, putting on the necklace (which had stopped glowing) and stroking the corks with her fingers. "That won't work, probably," Luna said. "It sounds like Chandra has psychometry or something like it as well as being an empath, and that's not going to be affected by a cleansing. Even though he's sensing the feelings of the animal, if the cutting up and cooking didn't get rid of what he's sensing, then a cleansing isn't going to do anything."

"Why's that?"

Luna grabbed one of the corks and put it against her lips as she thought for a few moments.

"Well..." she said at last, "think of it like this: if you had a piece of wood, all smoothed and lacquered, and spilled some cream sauce on it, you could clean the wood with a spell or by wiping it clean. But if you tried the same cleaning spell to try to get rid of a worm that was living in the wood, it wouldn't work. For one thing, the spell wouldn't work on a living creature that was on the surface of the wood unless it was too small to see with the naked eye. Not even sure it works then, or just disperses such creatures into the air. But a worm wouldn't be affected by the cleaning spell, except maybe to make the worm itself a little cleaner. And it sure wouldn't work on any filth under the surface of the wood."

"Oh. So cleansing doesn't go deep enough?"

"That's part of it. It's also an imperfect metaphor, because I think what Chandra's sensing is the meat's memory from when it was alive, which is part of the meat's essence, the same way your memories are part of what makes you who you are. I don't know of anything that can get rid of those memories without Vanishing the object as a side-effect."

"Ah, I see."

The conversation about cleansing was over with now, though.

"How's yer herbal tea, Javier?" Hagrid asked.

"It's excellent. Could use a little honey, though."

"BLECK!" Zoey said, pulling a face. "Honey with lavender? BARF! Gag me with a spoon!"

"This coming from the girl who, if rumor is true, once ate – and enjoyed – a truly disgusting sandwich made of French toast, cinnamon toast, eggs, sausage, kippers, ketchup, and jam."

"So what? That doesn't mean I can't still find something yucky. Honey and lavender tea is icky, as is any kind of tea after eating peppermint, but especially black tea. Or peppermint flavored black tea."

Javier defiantly put a spoon of honey in his tea while staring at Zoey's forehead, stirred, and sipped it with delight while Zoey pulled funny faces and mimed puking over the side of the table, complete with very realistic upchuck noises that made Luna and Hagrid both look a little green, but which merely made Javier's eye twitch.

Since that tactic wasn't working, she tried another one. "Honey's made of bee vomit, you know. They drink nectar and puke it up and it becomes honey."

"That's nice," Javier said, largely ignoring her.

"And... and... and Muggles love vanilla so much they made real vanilla very expensive and now they have artificial vanilla flavor, but really it's made from a beaver's anal gland!"

Luna set her tea down. "Hagrid, do you have any food-grade peppermint oil?"

"Ya. Yeh want some?"

"Yes please. In the meantime, I have a naughty little girl to punish."

She leaped out of her seat and grabbed Zoey, who struggled. Luna wrestled her to the ground and tickled her mercilessly, her shrieks of laughter filling the small hut and then becoming wheezes as she couldn't breathe, which is when Luna stopped.

"Adequate punishment, I think. What do you think, Javier?"

Javier nodded. "I agree."

That afternoon, bored, Zoey wrote a letter:

 _Dear Sirius,_

 _Hi! It's me! ZOEY! Meep meep, vroom vroom vroom!_

 _So I had an intrestin day, I did I did I did. So some meanie nasty poopy doody heads stole some of Luna's things when she forgot ta put em back, and she was very upset at dinner cuz one of em was her butterbeer cork necklace, which she needs to touch when she's stressed, and she gets stressed a lot cuz she's an empath too and not just a calm place for empaths to get lost in. We think that's a side effect of her coping mechanismisms._

 _Sooooo natch I had ta find her things and take steps to stop more thefty-wefties. I was on my way to do that when I realized I didn't have a good plan and so I had the silly notion to use the Room of Requirement but it showed me this huge room fulla centuries of junk we're gonna havta go through later with aurors and whatnot but we're leavin it be for now, McGonagall said. (Speaking of McGonagall, does she ever patrol as a kitty? I kinda wanna find her as a kitty, grab her in a hug while shouting "KITTY!" Of course she might scratch me I guess so maybe I won't do that after all. But it's fun ta think about, right?)_

 _Anyway so then I went to the Ravenclaw dorms and found all her missing things, put Anti-Theft Charms on them all (and the resta the stuff in her trunk) and put it all back except I took her the necklace she needed. Took me a hecka long time ta find her, too. Had ta ask the Map, and found a function I hadn't knowed about: the ripply circly thingies, I hope you know what I mean. So I found her that way and she was feeding thestrals in the Forbidden Forest with Javier, only don't report them because Hagrid was in the area and knew they were there, so they had permission._

 _I helped feed they bony horsies too, including a wee little bebe fawny-wawny SOOOOOO 'dordable! You should see 'em! I dunno, can you see thestrals? Actually I hope you can't cuz that would be sad and bad and I'd have to cry and hug you but you're not here to hug so then I'd have to jump through the Floo to you, and McGonagall would have kittens only not literally unless... can animagi have kittens or other babies with animals? Wait never mind that's icky I hope nobody's ever tried that but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Though I 'spose they could make babies with other animagi in their animagi form but then that's kinda icky too in a way but not as much, but can you imagine two goat animagi having kids together and OH MY GOODNESS ME McGonagall was married once, did she ever have kids? Not goat ones obviously but yanno. I hope she had grand-babies too._

 _Oh wait I got off topic. What was I talkin bout? Oh yeah I got Luna's stuff back and then I put a bunch of dungbombs in the trunks of the bullies and a few other people to make it look like a random prank. I hope they don't blame Luna for it, that would be bad._

 _Almost forgot to mention I'm using a dicta-quill for this, otherwise my hand would get all crampy from all this writing. You probly guessed that though with all the ramblyness and wandering about everywhere. Took some doing to get it to write in my style rather than spelling everythin the right way, how boring is that?_

 _OH MY GOODNESS does McGonagall ever get hairballs? HA! Now I'm imagining her hacking up a hairball in her classroom. I wonder if she ever has nightmares about doing that in front of a class? Oh and are animagi naked when they're animals? I mean I never looked in certain places, that would be very rude, but it's kinda weird if you're naked even though animals are naked but I guess it'd be a bit of a giveaway if your animagus form had a doggie sweater and OH MY GOODNESS now I know what I'm getting you for your birthday! When is your birthday anyway? I need to know! My birfday parties for people are getting famous! Or infamous. Depends on your point of view I 'spose._

 _PLEASE TELL ME YOU DON'T HUMP THE FURNITURE! Wait never mind, don't tell me. I don't wanna think about it._

 _Animagus thing ain't been goin good for us. You'd think it'd be easy but something is blocking us and we can't figger it out. Maybe with a certain librarian goddess's help we can figure it out? Of course she's been a meanie nasty poopy face who yells a lot so maybe I'd have more luck squeezing coal into diamonds, though she did explain some thingies to Al about ritual magic so maybe her head's slipping outta her bum. Luna says diamonds are bad cuz they amplify empathic energy like a LOT. Both the good and the bad. Also they're kinda boring, just looks like cut glass to us. I'd rather have colorful things like jade or emeralds or peacock ore or opals!_

 _We haven't flown the thestrals yet, Hagrid ain't let us yet. :(_

 _Like my sad smiley face? I had ta draw that myself cuz the quill was just like "Huh? Wha?" and maybe I should find a way to do smileys with it but that's a lot of work and I'm all about fun for the rest of the day. But if I do figger it out I can send like a million different smileys!_

 _Know any good spells to use on Peeves? I think it'd be fun to drive him bonkers, watch the chaos that results. It'd be entertaining. Bet you're picturing me steepling my fingers with an evil grin on my face going "MWAH HA HA HA HA! My evil plan has come to fruition!" Speaking of fruit, I like raspberries. You should get me a raspberry plant so I can put it in my window and have raspberries ALL THE TIME! (HA! Al just said, "Like you need the sugar, demon child!")_

 _Iliana had a dream last night about riding around on your motorbike like a badass. Black leather jacket with fringe, a red bandanna on her head, sunglasses, and spiky boots. She looked like she was in a biker gang. Only the motorbike in the dream didn't have a sidecar._

 _Oh and if you could tell me how to lock Snape out of his office in a way so the password is somethin like "I, Severus Snape, love to cuddle my pink teddy bear when I has a sad" or something like that, let me know. I'd do it myself but I don't know how and a certain mathy librarian nearly broke my eardrums screaming at me when I asked her how to do it._

 _Well I'm outta stuff to talk about now. Gonna go see if I can find somethin else to do fun around here, like maybe I can replace all Dumbledore's shampoo with hair-removal potion or turn Flitwick's funny white hair and beard into something ugly like a Hitler 'stache. Naw, that's too mean; I'll turn it pink instead. Should be easy, if I can find where he sleeps. If you have any ideas for pranks, let me know!_

 _Hope you find a girlfriend or boyfriend! Or both! Or some non-gendered romantic partner! (Hey, is Remus into guys? You two seem to hang out together a lot, even for friends. Hmm... doggie and wolfie, howling at the moon, may-be lat-er They. Can. Spoon! First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Siri with the puppy carriage!)_

 _XOXO_

 _-Zoey Potter_

 _PS = Give Remus my love. :)_

 _PPS = I'm starstruck, simply over the moon, about the thought of you and Remus shacking up. :D (Not that I'm thinkin bout it too hard, cuz ICKY SEX THINGS! EWWW NO! PUUUKE! Just that it would be cute to see you two being kissy and huggy with each other.)_

 _PPPS = No seriously, you two should date if you're both into it. You'd be so_ _ **cute**_ _together!_

 _PPPPS = Luna-wuna helped me make the art move!_

It was decorated in little smiley-face suns and flowers, a few cute drawings of snakes or butterflies, and on the blank side of the parchment was a richly detailed drawing Zoey had done; there were trees and flowers she'd made to sway in the breeze despite being very cartoony in appearance. There was a picture of a lake with simple childishly drawn mer-people, some of which were swimming while another was half out of the water and waving and smiling at anyone who saw the drawing. A dragon flew over the lake, chasing what looked like Draco Malfoy on a broom. The little Draco was silently screaming, his broomstick tail on fire.

There was more. Snakes slithered in the grass, butterflies flapped their wings flying around. Every now and then a pair of dragonflies zipped through the image. A snail was sitting on a mushroom-shaped stool eating cake from a table that looked like a flat-topped mushroom. The snail even had a bib on and was using a fork, and was smiling. A yellow smiling sun sat in the sky bouncing up and down like it was dancing to some unheard music, while puffy white clouds drifted by, and birds flew around through the clouds and the trees.

She rolled up the parchment and sent it to Sirius with Hedwig.

After sending the letter, Zoey was still bored. To entertain herself, she started crawling around behind the various cats in the Griffindor common room, trying in vain to sneak up on them like a prowling cat on the hunt. She could almost swear Crookshanks had rolled his eyes at her when she tried it on him, but unlike the others he didn't run away. Just sat there, looking annoyed as she rolled over on her back and batted at him like she was a cat herself. It even included Zoey lifting her legs partway up in the air like a cat asking for belly scritches. (Luckily she had on shorts under her skirt.) She even purred and meowed realistically enough that one of the other cats came to see where the crying kitten was. It was very annoyed when it saw the sounds were just coming from a human.

It was when she was in the middle of playing with a large ball of yarn she'd conjured for this purpose, getting very much into the "kitten" role, that it happened. The ball of yarn quadrupled in size, frightening her. She ran off, and ran right into Crookshanks... who was also huge. Or was he?

She looked at her hands, but they were paws. She'd become a cat! She bounded up the stairs as best she could with her little kitten body (which occasionally had her hanging from the tops of steps by her forelegs in a funny way) and into her bedroom, where she climbed on the bed with her claws to look at herself in the mirror.

The mirror showed her a tan kitten with black fur on its head that went down its back in a sort of pigtail shape. The scar was there, too, as a jagged white line of fur on her head. And of course, her eyes were the same; one blue, and one hazel.

"Mrow?" she said in surprise. It was, of course, a genuine meow.

Excited that she'd done it at last, she climbed off the bed and ran around in circles celebrating. She then left the room again and went to Ron's room to find him, but he wasn't there. She tried thinking how to find him, but she couldn't use the Marauder's Map without a wand and her voice, and she didn't want to change back yet. So she curled up on Ron's bed and waited.

When she woke up a few hours later, she was still a kitten. She'd woken up because Ron was coming in.

"Oy, little kitten, who do you belong to? Wait... why do you look familiar?"

She turned around and waved her cat butt at him, then turned back to face him and stuck her tongue out at him.

"Zoey? Did you lot finally figure out... the thing?"

The other boys came in then, and Ron picked her up.

"Someone's lost a kitten," he said. "I'm gonna find out who it belongs to."

"Okay, Ron."

But of course, he didn't do that. He went, instead, to the Potter room and set Zoey down on the bed.

"So you gonna turn back now?"

Zoey rolled over on her back and exposed her belly to him.

Ron sighed. "Okay, I'll scratch your belly, if you're so keen on it. Then you need to turn back."

He scratched her belly, and it was heavenly. She understood why cats liked this so much. When it was over, she got up and presented her head for him to scratch. Obligingly, he scratched her behind the ears. Then she got him to stroke her along her spine. The feeling when he got to her tail was so intense she got weak-kneed and fell over, meowing.

"Enough joking around, Zoey, if that really is you. God, if I find out you're just some random cat I'm talking to and not Zoey or one of the others, I'm gonna be so peeved."

He picked her up and she took the opportunity to climb his robes and perch on his shoulder. Though it wasn't any taller than Al was when they were him, the fact she was so much smaller now made it seem like she was atop a skyscraper almost. She yowled in fright and nearly fell off, digging her claws into Ron and making him yowl too. But then she got back into position on his shoulder and licked his ear to apologize.

"Come on," he said, sounding angry, "I'll take you to McGonagall. She can tell me for sure whether you're really a cat or not."

McGonagall was just coming out of her office when Ron got there, as it was almost dinner time. (Ron, like the others, had gone in to get cleaned up for dinner after having been outside all day long.)

"Yes, Mr. Weasley, what do you want?" she asked.

"I, uh... look, can we talk in your office?"

She sighed. "I suppose so. Come on in. Let's make it quick, though."

They went in, and she closed the door behind her.

"We won't be overheard, will we?"

"No, Mr. Weasley. I have spells on every inch of my office to keep out eavesdroppers. What is the problem?"

"Well, I just want you to tell me if this is really a cat or if it's an animagus. I couldn't find Crookshanks; I think he's in Hermione's room."

"An animagus? Why do you-oh, never mind. I see why you're wondering." She was looking at Zoey's lightning-shaped fur pattern, her eyes, and the weird pigtail-shaped coloration.

She turned into her cat animagus form, and Ron put Zoey down on the floor next to her. Zoey casually started cleaning herself with her tongue while McGonagall sniffed her.

Zoey felt something from McGonagall, a questioning sort of feeling. She sent one back. The two animagi then started a conversation in Cat.

'Smallest cat in multi-cat-one-cat?' McGonagall asked.

'Yes. Stiff tall teach-cat? Old-cat?'

'Yes. Punish-cat, too, if small tan-and-black cat remembers.'

Zoey rolled over on her back with her four legs in the air and said, 'Cute kitten. Punish-cat not hurt cute kitten?'

Ignoring that, McGonagall continued. 'I want you be bigger cat when I be that first; two-legged cat, so we can speak two-legged to two-legged.'

'No. I like being kitten. Two-leggeds scratch my belly and head. Two-leggeds stroke my spine. I like spine stroking. I fell over, it was so good.'

'Please be bigger small-cat now, or punish-cat will punish you and other cats in family.'

Zoey huffed. 'Stiff tall teach-cat is _mean_ cat. No-fun cat. Not as mean as two-legged tall flying-mouse with smelly metal food-things with not-food in them, but mean-cat all the same.'

'Do the thing, kitten. Be bigger and two-legged. Now.'

'Yes, yes. I be big now.'

She got back up on her feet. There was a pause as she concentrated. Then she looked embarrassed. 'Kitten not know how be two-legged again. Teach-cat help?'

'Remember being two-legged. Remember tall. Remember grabby paws-not-paws. Remember fur-not-fur.'

Zoey blinked slowly at McGonagall, since this functioned like a nod in Cat, at least in this context, and tried again. In the process, she tried standing on her hind legs, and ended up 'talking' in Cat as she did.

'I tall not-as-fun two-legged. I say boring things in weird meows and eat medicine for food. I eat plants for food. No hunt. Silly big-eyed short two-leggeds feed me, and I make noises and light with a bit of tree. Boring boring boring talk talk talk. Not-'

With a POP, Zoey became human again and fell over.

"Yikes! Aww... now I'm sad." She turned her head to look up at Ron. "Scritch my earsies? Stroke my spine?"

"No," said Ron. "I'm going to dinner. Thank you, Professor."

McGonagall returned to her human form as well. "You're welcome, Mr. Weasley. You're dismissed."

Ron left the room and closed the door. Zoey was on her hands and knees rubbing her head against McGonagall's robes.

"Miss Potter, please stand up before you turn into a cat again."

"Darn. You're no fun," she said, getting up by grabbing the desk, briefly a bit wobbly, like she was trying to remember how to stand on two legs again.

"Miss Potter, unless you somehow managed to keep a mandrake leaf in your mouth for a month without talking, through meals, through the night as you slept, and through your transformations, I assume you did not become an animagus the normal way?"

"Right-a-rootie, Professor. I- Wait, a whole month? They can't take it out at all?"

"That's correct."

"What if they swallow it?"

"Then they have to start over again."

"No wonder there's so few animagi. Wait, my dad and Sirius and the rat managed to do that? Wasn't it suspicious?"

"I have never asked how they managed it, but given that they were never silent for so much as a day, to my knowledge, I presume they either managed to do it without going mute, or else they did it during the summer. Now can you please tell me how you came to be an animagus?"

"Well, we've been trying for months and months, all year really and part of the summer, too. We have a book about it that Sirius gave us. We've become part-cat part-human hybrids before, but never gone full cat before. I was pretending to be a cat, playing, when it happened."

"I see. Well, try it again, just to see if you can."

Zoey once more got down on her hands and knees.

"Miss Potter, you will eventually have to learn how to do it from a standing position. Some of the benefits of being an animagus are quite lost on you if you have to go to that much work to change."

Zoey stuck her tongue out. "Big tall cat no fun. Kitten-"

POP! She was a kitten again, looking just the same. She put her forepaws up on the desk, standing on two legs, and with another POP she turned human again.

"Well you're getting faster already. Just try to shake the cat mentality as much as possible so you don't change in front of the whole school."

"Speaking of that, do I have to register?"

McGonagall thought about it a moment. "Normally I would say yes, but Dumbledore seems to think You-Know-Who is making a bid to come back to power, so I will do the uncharacteristic thing and tell you to keep this a secret. Obviously you can tell any friends who will help keep the secret, of course."

"Good to know, tea- er, Professor."

"Good. Now go down to dinner before it's over. You are dismissed."

Nodding, she skipped off down the hall whistling the tune of "Ev'rybody Wants To Be A Cat" from The Aristocats, all the way to the Great Hall. Once there, she sat down across from Ron and grinned toothily at him while she heaped food onto her plate.

Ron did a double-take on seeing her. When she raised her eyebrow quizzically, he spoke.

"Zoey, you lost a tooth!"

"Someone finally noticed! YAY!" She grinned again. "I didn't lose it. I left it out on purpose last time I became me. I think I look cuter with one missing tooth, don't you?"

Hermione turned to look at Zoey's new smile.

"Hmm... missing left-side lower lateral incisor, I'd say." Hermione said. "And it looks like one of your upper central incisors on the same side is half as grown as the other."

Ron goggled at her. "Ladderal _what_ now? And how would you know what it's called anyway?"

Hermione sighed. _"Lateral_ incisor. It's between the central incisor and the cuspid or canine tooth. And I know because my parents are dentists. They fix teeth for a living, Ronald. Remember?"

"Oh," said Neville, who was nearby. "So _that's_ what a dentist does?"

Sighing, Hermione squeezed the bridge of her nose, then went back to eating.

"Which one is the incisor?" Ron asked.

Swallowing, Hermione said, "The ones in front that cut your food."

"Ah, okay. Well Zoey's right, I suppose; she does kinda look cuter that way. Which must mean she's up to something."

"She's always up to something," Hermione said. "She's Zoey."

"Hey! I resemble that remark!" Zoey said, grinning.

That night, Zoey resisted the temptation to become a cat again, and instead spent time with Aqua out of her enclosure, laying on her belly pretending to be a snake while Aqua looked at her, expressing confusion.

 _'I smell mice,'_ Zoey said. _'I can feel their heat. I slither towards them.'_

 _'Where? I smell no mice.'_

 _'I'm playing pretend! Anyway, yes. I am a scaly hunter, sniffing mice as I slither on my belly. I flick my tongue and see their heat-picture in my mind-'_

With a POP, she shrunk again. Confused, she tried looking at her paws, but there were none. She had no arms or legs.

 _'What's going on! Why can't I feel my limbs?'_

When Aqua finished laughing in her snakey way, she said, _'Because you have become a snake. Same kind as I am.'_

 _'How can I be a snake? I was a cat! My animal form is a kitten!'_

 _'Well I assure you, you are a snake now. I would not lie about this.'_

Zoey tried to get to the bed so she could see herself in the mirror, but she could hardly figure out how to move in this body. She felt constricted, like she was in a full body-bind, except she could kinda move, so more like a straight jacket? She strained harder against the constricted feeling.

POP! She'd wriggled so hard, struggled so hard against the snake form that she'd become human again. She had hands and hair and everything.

"Woah... I'm a multi-animal animagus!"

But as she thought about it, something didn't make sense. "I thought patronuses were also animagi forms? But none of us has a cat patronus, though Tier's is a jaguar. Nor a grass snake patronus either; closest there is Al's Runespoor patronus."

She tried an experiment, this time pretending to be a raven, like her own patronus. She certainly had the personality for it, as ravens are clever tricksters just like Zoey. But try as she might, for almost an hour, she couldn't become a raven.

Trying another bird, she worked her way into the mentality of an owl. Within a minute, she became a snowy owl, like Hedwig.

"This is confusing," she said when she was human again. "I can become a cat, a grass snake, and an owl, none of which are patronus forms for us, but not a raven, which is. Hmm..."

Next she tried a fox, but that was another dud. So was cuttlefish, and again jaguar was a dud. But when she tried a dog, she became a boarhound like Fang, rather than whatever kind of dog Sirius was. She tried other breeds of dog, and the only one she managed was bulldog, like Aunt Marge's dog Ripper. Thinking of breeds, she tried cat breeds, but could only become the one form of cat she'd already done.

Then she tried, just for kicks, to become a spider, and it worked. She had no idea what kind of spider she was, as she couldn't see herself, and Aqua wasn't able to identify it in any way that was useful to her.

"Why a spider? Why a dog and a cat? Why an owl, but not a raven?"

She tried becoming other sorts of owls, and managed several different species of owls, including the tiny scops owl like the one Sirius owned, and a long-eared owl like Ron's. She thought she recognized Javier's owl in one of the owl forms she managed, too.

"Well at least I can fly if I need to."

She tried a bunch of other forms, including eagle, pigeon, rat, bat, mouse, and the boa constrictor she once spoke with in the zoo, but none of those worked either, though for some reason she managed to become a parakeet. The only species of snake she could become, out of those she knew enough to try, was grass snake.

Given the example of spider, she tried other creepy crawlies. House fly worked, as did mosquito, ladybug, grasshopper, butterfly, moth, walking stick, and ant. But centipede didn't work, nor did millipede. She couldn't become most of the specific types of spiders she knew about either, like Black Widow, Huntsman, or tarantula, but when she got to a mirror she thought it looked like she could become a Daddy Long-legs, which wasn't even technically a spider.

 _'I shall have to remember to only eat when I can see you in human form,'_ Aqua said to her. _'Or else I fear I'd probably eat you by mistake.'_

She tried fish next, in the tub. Goldfish worked, but it was the only one that did. Octopus was a dud, too. Out of the water, other invertebrates that she could become (other than insects or spiders) included earthworm and snail, but nothing else she could think of.

 _Oh my goodness this is so frustrating,_ she thought at the others. _Why some things and not others? Why a bloody snail or earthworm, but not a raven or a jaguar? Or even some kind of snake other than grass snake?_

After a bit more experimenting, she found she could become a chicken, a cow, and a pig as well. Also a turkey, for some reason.

 _~I have something of an unusual idea,~_ Chandra said to her.

 _What's that?_

 _~First, can you be a toad?~_

Zoey concentrated on being a toad, but nothing happened.

 _Now what?_

 _~Now find Neville and ask him if you can hold Trevor.~_

Shrugging, she left her room. She soon found Neville doing his homework in the common room and she saw Trevor sitting there on the table next to him.

"Heya Neville," she said.

"Hi Zoey," Neville said, distracted.

"Hey Neville?"

"What?"

"Could I hold Trevor for a moment? Chandra asked me to."

Neville hesitated.

"I wouldn't hurt him. What kind of a monster do you think I am?"

"Well, okay," he said, picking the toad up and putting it in her open hands.

"How do you know he's a boy toad?"

"Er... um... I guess I don't."

She wasn't sure what was supposed to be happening. After about a minute, she got bored and handed Neville his toad again.

"What was that for, anyway?"

"No idea. Chandra will tell me when I get back upstairs. He's weird sometimes."

Neville gave her A Look.

"Well I guess we're all weird but anyway, I'm off to find out what that was for."

She ran back upstairs and closed the door behind her when she got to their room.

 _~Good. Now try to become a toad again.~_

Sighing, she tried it again. Only, this time it worked. She shrunk down to a toad, hopped around a bit, and then became a human again.

"What the heckadoodly-doo?"

 _~It's animals we've touched, or felt the energy of. That was proof.~_

 _But we've touched a rat before, and that one didn't work!_

 _~Actually, we've touched a rat-form animagus, not an actual rat.~_

 _So to turn into something, we have to have touched it before?_

 _~I believe so. Make a list of the animals we cannot yet become, and we shall touch some examples of them later.~_

 _I don't remember ever touching a cow or a pig or a turkey._

 _~I believe it may include animals we've eaten, or nearly eaten, since I joined the group.~_

 _Oh. Well that's a bit awkward. What about a parakeet?_

 _~Didn't our third-grade class have a pet parakeet?~_

 _Oh right._

She then changed into an owl and started flying around the grounds for a few hours before coming back to go to bed, which was a lot of fun, though not as fun as flying on a broom. While she tried to get to sleep, she decided she would have to keep this ability a secret.

 _Dear Zoey and company,_

 _Oh my, you really are a silly one. I laughed til I had to stop in order to breathe again, because of your letter!_

 _Once more, I'm glad you're helping your friend. I don't know whether McGonagall patrols as a cat, but James and I sent her an enormous ball of yarn for Christmas one year, the look on her face was hilarious! Totally worth the detention! Just keep that in mind if you try to hug her when she's a cat._

 _I wouldn't report your friends for feeding thestrals, Zoey. But in the future you might want to keep information like that out of the letters, you never know who might intercept the owls._

 _Oh my. I don't know about animagi having babies in their animal forms, and I'm not sure I want to know. I also don't think you should ask McGonagall about her husband, she still mourns him._

 _I was born November 3_ _rd_ _, and no I do not hump the furniture, you dirty-minded little imp. Not that it's any of your business._

 _A doggie sweater would be a hilarious gift for me, no occasion required. The look on Remus's face when he saw me in it would be worth laughs for weeks. Get me one with little doggie bone patterns, maybe the name "Snuffles" embroidered on it. As to animagi and clothes, I honestly don't know. They come back when we turn human again, so I imagine they probably go somewhere, but then the question of where that mass goes when you transfigure stuff is something you'd have to ask McGonagall about. I understood just enough of the theory of transfiguration to become an animagus, and then Azkaban made me forget it because the dementors ate holes in my brain. I was always more adept at the practical side of transfiguration anyway._

 _I don't recommend messing with Peeves. He's all fun and games until you anger him sufficiently. I read that they once tried expelling him from the school centuries ago, and they had to evacuate the school, he caused so much bedlam as a result. So yeah, please don't do that. I mean I can always send you to Beaxbatons if you get expelled, but getting used to everyone speaking French could be difficult for you._

 _Not sure if your dream means Iliana wants to own her own motorbike or not, but she'd have to be 16 to get her license with the Muggle government. We can discuss it more if she's interested. Or leave it at that if it was just a silly dream. But she sounded pretty groovy-looking from your description._

 _No I will not tell you how to lock Snape out of his office, as hilarious as that would be. I'm hoping to keep you_ _ **alive**_ _this year, remember? HA! :) Thanks for the information about smiley-faces! :)_

 _If you do replace all of Dumbledore's shampoo with hair-removal potion, send me a picture of him bald, it would make my month. :) But yeah, don't be mean to Flitwick, he's cool._

 _You just mind your own business and don't try to hook either of us up with anyone, okay you little imp? I'm getting out of the house. Mostly into Muggle areas, but hey, if I married a Muggle my mother would catch fire from spinning so fast in her grave! HA! And yes I am ignoring your comments about Remus and I. I'm not entirely sure Remus has ever dated anyone or shown any interest at all. Not sure at all, given my memory issues._

 _By the way, I don't know how she'll take this, but Fangslaughter wants to talk to Hypatia about how she got past the wards. We haven't told him anything about her, not even her name or gender. She can refuse if she wants, but Fangslaughter says he'll pay her if she explains it to him. His initial offer is a thousand galleons, but he's willing to haggle. I'm not sure whether the knowledge is even worth that much, as I get the impression Hypatia is one of the few people in the world who can do that without a computer, and he says the Gringott's wards already ward against computers. Messes them up or something, I don't remember and honestly I wasn't paying a lot of attention when he started rambling on about the specifics._

 _I ran into someone at the Ministry the other day, a relative of both of us. Her name is Auror Tonks. She and her mother Andromeda Tonks nee Black are cousins to the both of us, you know how pureblood families are. She married a Muggleborn, Ted Tonks, and got disowned by the family. But after meeting Tonks (as Auror Nymphadora Tonks prefers to be called), I looked into it and apparently my mother only Exiled me, rather than officially disowning me, which expired with the mad old bat. I guess she was holding out hope her first born son would see the error of his ways. Makes sense, especially after my idiot brother got killed trying to leave the Death Eaters._

 _Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that I'm officially the last Black left in the family, officially a Lord and all. Annoying, but I'm gonna use it to make my mum spin in her grave by officially reinstating Andromeda and her family into the Black family. I was in the middle of the parchment-work when I got your owl. Wish I could've introduced you to them over the Easter holidays, but well, over the summer will have to do._

 _I'm actually a little leery of introducing Zoey to Dora, to be honest. They're so much alike it'd be a bit scary seeing them interact. But Zoey would get a kick out of Dora, not the least of which reasons is Dora is a metamorphmagus, means she can alter her appearance at will. It's a rare gift, something she's born with. But now I'm remembering you mentioned something about that in your first year, Madam Pomfrey thought you weren't one for some reason. I don't want to call her wrong, she knows more about Healing than I do, but honestly I think you lot must be some sort of metamorph. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out the odd aspects of your transformation ability was your whole multiplicity situation in your brain warping the metamorph powers in strange ways. After all, Tier can shapeshift, which is essentially the same thing as being a metamorph, and some of the others have shown the ability to alter their forms with some effort. It wouldn't necessarily explain your ability to pull things Inside, but sounds like a good hypothesis to me._

 _Oh yeah, I was in the Ministry because I was picking up a few things there related to my inheritance, like the keys and ward-codes to mum's old house. I don't give a fig about the house, might just pay to have it cleaned out and then sell it to be honest, I haven't really decided yet. I went to Gringott's after that for the rest of it, vault keys and the like, which is where I ran into Fangslaughter, if you were wondering._

 _I got off track there. The reason I mentioned I went to the Ministry was because among the things I got there from my inheritance was, well... I'm apparently a Lord now, with a Wizengamot seat. It's not really my thing, politics, but with Malfoy and others of his ilk helping make laws, I figured it was my duty to oppose those bastards._

 _Another thing: I found out you have a Wizengamot seat as well. Dumbledore had Dedalus Diggle as your proxy, voting under your name for Dumbledore. I've been reading into their voting record and I'm not sure I like most of it, and I think you'll feel the same. Dumbledore may be the bastion of the Light, but some of his political stances don't make sense, and he's a bit of a wimp, politically, to be honest. Reading the minutes of some of the more important sessions, he does a lot of mediating, which I guess he has to as Chief Warlock, but he does it a bit too much._

 _Like I said, his voting record is aggravating too. For one example, some horrible woman named Umbridge is working with Amos Diggory to spearhead some legislation that will make it nearly impossible for werewolves to get jobs. Honestly, it's like this woman_ _ **wants**_ _the werewolves to feel so desperate they'll become violent just so she has an excuse to swoop in and exterminate the lot of them. I did some asking around, and she has a long history of being a very humanocentric evil bitch, which is really hypocritical of her, as she appears to look like a fat, bipedal toad. But she's Fudge's Undersecretary, which is something like the vice-minister I think, so she's gonna be a hard one to fight. But dammit, I owe it to Remus at least to stop that shite from passing if I can._

 _Sorry, got off track again. As your godfather, I'm able to change who the proxy for the Potter seat is, if you want me to. I'm not sure who to put there. I barely know Andromeda, but she seems nice. Pureblood Slytherin, but she married a Muggle-born, and she's a Healer. Or, well this was just a passing funny thought, but Xeno being the proxy would be funny as hell!_

 _Well, there IS another option; it's a little unusual, but given you're the only remaining Potter, and you're 14, you could take the seat yourself when you turn 15. It would take you out of school a few days a month at least, something to keep in mind for that option._

 _Anyway, regardless of which option you go with, you should be informed on the issues with transcripts of the minutes, and other resources and information either way. After all, even with a proxy, they should be there to vote the way you'd want them to vote, since you're old enough to have informed opinions on these things. Like, it occurred to me when I remembered you telling me about Dobby, that maybe we could try to get something passed to protect house elves from being abused. Well more accurately, to punish people who get caught abusing their house elves. Currently they're considered property, their masters can legally do anything they want to them, even kill them, without legal repercussions._

 _I know this is a lot of stuff to dump on you, especially as we draw nearer to finding out what the Third Task is going to be, but take your time, discuss it among yourselves. Don't slack in your homework and keep on staying vigilant, we still don't know who put your names in that blasted cup._

 _PS = Gave Remus your love. He says to send you his love, too. So here it is: (Remus's love)_

 _PPS = I love your art, Zoey, it's adorable! I'm putting it up on the wall across from the Floo, people will see it when they come into the house._

 _Dear Sirius,_

 _Yeah, that's a lot alright. Gonna ignore most of it for now and get back to it later. For now, I'm just gonna say:_ _ **"...a toad will cow you with a grin."**_ _You know, from my cryptic prophecy? Seriously, a woman who looks like a toad, and is a huge bigot high up in the Ministry ranks? Maybe it's a leap, but I've got an intuition I'm right. I'm not sure why she'd be relevant to the prophecy I made, but 'to cow someone' means to frighten them into submission, and given who I was giving the prophecy to, apparently she and Trelawney will meet? Which makes no sense to me. Trelawney rarely leaves her room, and I can't think of a single reason why the person second only to the Minister of Magic himself would be having anything to do with that old fraud of a teacher. Could Umbridge be a Death Eater? Maybe Wraithy McMoldyPants wants, um... the you-know-what? Not sure how he'd manage that when I'm pretty sure she doesn't have the thing as far as I know, and he literally doesn't have a leg to stand on nor anyone on his side to bring back bring back his body to him to him, but well, McMoldyPants was never as smart as he seemed to think he was._

 _Anyway, it's late and I'm tired. Write you more later, Sirius!_

 _All our love,_

 _Alastair Potter and company_

Endnotes: Okay, so I didn't make the conscious decision that Luna would be autistic until a couple days before starting this chapter, but clearly I've been subconsciously making her that way for a while now. There are signs all the way back to the chapter where we found out she has laugh attacks/giggle fits sometimes, a trait I borrowed from a fellow autistic friend of mine. Then there was her reaction to Honeyduke's and her dislike of Zonko's. So it's another case of my subconscious mind getting way ahead of my conscious mind. Anyway, I've already talked in the notes about thinking canon Luna is autistic, the case for this being overwhelming in my opinion, so I consider this to be an extension of that.

I regret not making the Potter collective autistic as well, because there are some interesting ways that autism and multiplicity interact strangely with one another that would've been neat to add to the story, but at this point the only members of the Potter collective who might be autistic are Chandra and Hypatia, and those were not done that way on purpose, I just tend to make my characters autistic by default the way non-autistic people make their characters not autistic by default. Write what you know, you know?

Despite Zoey's enthusiasm for Wolfstar (Sirius/Remus for the uninitiated), I haven't actually decided if that's where it's going or not. It's just, well... Molly Elizabeth, our inner 7 year old, was writing that letter in her writing style and it was her who was suddenly enthused about Wolfstar. :)

Got a bit behind on this because I've been working on an original work of mine that I'm really excited about, inspired by this fic among other things.

For some reason, in canon Harry's 4th year they didn't get out of school until July 2nd, giving them only a less than two month summer break, which is absurd seeing as they were out by June 19th the two years before, the next two years are unclear but looks about the same, if not earlier. So I'm having the Third Task be on June 10th so the end of term will be June 19th. So looks like the stuff with Crouch Senior will be on May 10th.

The music Luna is listening to in the Room of Requirement is fictional given the year, but based off Gary Stadler's stuff (especially the ones with Wendy Rule singing). It's not actually them because they didn't make music until 1996, but that's my inspiration (especially "Fairy Nightsongs"). And I'm sure they weren't the first people to make music like that, though that's just a guess really.


	39. Hypatia's Gambit

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 39"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Thirty-nine: Hypatia's Gambit**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much. There's a lot of those in this one, but don't skim through or you'll miss things.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _Zoey_ _, #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and between hashtags/pound signs**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__

 _%_ _ _Mother AKA Avani Maznah, %__ and __(Hypatia/Megan.)__

 **Note 4:** All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

 _The following Friday, the morning owls came in, and as soon as Hermione saw the_ _ _Daily Prophet__ _'s headline, she gasped. Iliana looked up, waited for Hermione to finish the paper, and then took it from her, since they both knew she'd see it eventually. Unsurprisingly, it was a Rita Skeeter article._

 _ _ **Potter's Secret Pain, and Someone to Share It With.**__

 _ _By = Rita Skeeter__

 _ _A child like no other, perhaps, yet a child suffering from a great deal of emotional pain, and a deeply troubled past. Deprived of love at an early age by the death of Lily and James Potter, Adira Potter (formerly known as "Harry Potter,") the Child-Who-Lived is in a relationship with one Luna Lovegood, daughter of eccentric "Quibbler" editor Xenophilius Lovegood. The two girls have been seen together a lot lately, in places such as the old (and largely abandoned) Lookout Point in Hogsmeade village, Muggle shops and a Muggle "movie theater."__

 _ _However, it is perhaps their appearance at a Muggle ice cream shop in London that most confused this reporter, as over the Easter holidays this reporter witnessed Ms. Potter, who claims to be multiple people in a single body, have a panic attack and then a breakdown at the sight of her former guardians, the Dursley family of Little Whinging, Surrey. Ms. Potter had to be secretly taken away from the shop under cover of a noisy disturbance in order to not be spotted in turn by the Dursleys, still in a panic attack. She was then taken to a private room at The Leaky Cauldron, where she had a tearful breakdown and had to be comforted by Ms. Lovegood.__

 _ _At the time of the incident, Ms. Potter was in the form of the person-in-her-head she calls Iliana, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her dead mother Lily Potter, but with James's eyes. Ms. Potter was scared that Mrs. Dursley – Lily Potter's sister – would see "Iliana" wearing her dead sister's face and pitch such a fit that Obliviators would need to contain the situation.__

 _ _The sheer amount of terror Ms. Potter had at the sight of the Dursleys was alarming and confusing, so this reporter went about trying to find out why. What I found was nothing short of scandalous. According to the last will and testament of Lily and James Potter, young Adira (then "Harry") Potter was, in the event of their death, to go to Sirius Black if available (which he was not, being held without trial in Azkaban), or with Alice Longbottom if possible (tragically she was not) or Andromeda Tonks and her husband Ted Tonks if neither of them were available.__

 _ _However, none of these things happened. Instead of doing as their will requested, eccentric Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore abused his power as Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot and took it upon himself to put Adira Potter up with her aunt, Mrs. Dursley, and her husband Mr. Dursley. From interviews this reporter has done with several people for this article, that move was extremely controversial among those who knew about it. The consensus was that Mrs. Dursley and her husband hated magic and anyone who used it, to a degree similar to anti-witchcraft hate groups like the New Salem Philanthropic Society back in the states during the 1920's.__

 _ _Digging deeper, this reporter discovered that when he was still known as Harry, very few members of Little Whinging knew of the boy's existence until he started going to school, and he was only permitted to wear hand-me-downs from his enormously fat cousin Dudley Dursley despite Mr. Dursley being a director at a Muggle company called Grunnings, which makes drills, and thus the family being wealthy enough they could easily have spoiled both children, not just their own son. They owned a nice house in a nice neighborhood, had a nice car, and their son Dudley wanted for nothing. Meanwhile, Adira/Harry was wearing clothes several sizes too big for him, cheap glasses that had to be held together with cellotape, and was made to live in a cupboard under the stairs. It is not known if he was beaten, but it appears he was neglected, fed just enough to keep him alive and not looking__ _ _ **too**__ _ _abused, made to do nearly all the household chores while Dudley did none, and was bullied frequently by Dudley and his friends while the Dursleys looked the other way.__

 _ _What is worse, there's no indication at all that Dumbledore or anyone else in the wizarding world checked up on Potter for all those years. The first magical person Potter ever truly encountered in all those years was Dumbledore himself, which only happened in the summer before Potter's first year at Hogwarts, when Dumbledore responded to Potter understandably using accidental magic to sic venomous snakes on his evil relatives, and then run away from them.__

 _ _This all begs the question: why did Dumbledore put the savior of wizarding Britain in a home with people who clearly hated him, against the clear wishes of Lily and James? There were a great many wizarding families who would gladly have taken him in. Even Hogwarts could have taken Potter in as a ward; in fact, this is exactly what happened at the end of Potter's first year at Hogwarts, until Sirius Black was declared innocent and was able to take Potter in as the Potters' will demanded. So we must all ask Dumbledore why he felt it necessary to endanger Potter this way, putting her with people who could easily have turned Potter into the first obscurial in the world since the 1920's.__

 _ _What's more, we must find out why former Minister Millicent Bagnode allowed Dumbledore to do this, and find out who else knew yet remained silent. For it is clear that those years in the "care" of the Dursleys did a great deal of mental damage to Potter, if she's claiming to be multiple people in one body, especially if the claim is true; after all, Muggle sykyatrists who believe in the condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder believe that the condition is caused by extreme childhood trauma.__

 _ _Thankfully, for all this scandal and pain, at least Potter has someone to help her through it. May Ms. Potter and Ms. Lovegood continue to be good for each other for years to come.__

Iliana and the others didn't know what to think about this, but she felt the heat in her face from the shame of having the truth about the Dursleys revealed. But they did wonder, already, how the bloody hell Skeeter had found out? Skeeter stood out like a sore thumb; how had she spied on them at the Muggle ice cream shop and then again at the Leaky Cauldron, in a private room no less?

Finally, she said, "Well, at least now people might be a little less stupid about the Boy-Who-Lived crap. Apparently most people think I was living in a mansion and being trained in defense magic the whole time. Which might explain part of why Snape hated Addy so much when she was Harry, if he believed all that rubbish."

They looked up at Snape then. He was reading the paper with a look of growing (if suppressed) fury on his face. He kept glaring at Dumbledore as though to say 'We _are_ going to talk about this later,' but Dumbledore wasn't paying attention. He, too, was reading the article. He looked annoyed that Skeeter had dug up the truth, but also a lot more... resigned. As though he'd been waiting for this day to happen, and it finally had. And now that it had, he also looked tired.

The whole school ended up talking about it, and Iliana and the others were quickly getting tired of it. A great many of the Slytherins were using it as proof that Muggles were evil and so were Muggleborns while simultaneously pretending to have sympathy for Iliana etc as an excuse to remind them of things the article had said. But worst was the genuine sympathy from students in other Houses, most of whom had rarely if ever spoken to them, people who Iliana and the others had heard calling them a freak or an attention seeking liar before.

About the strangest thing to happen though was that afternoon's Potions class. Snape was avoiding looking at them for some reason, and seemed a lot more angry than usual, at one point tapping the blackboard with his wand so forcefully that the slate cracked from the force of the spell, and he'd had to repair it. Yet that still wasn't the weirdest thing he did that day.

Malfoy had been flashing his old "Potter stinks" badge at them, sitting right behind Iliana and saying things that were making her blood begin to boil. But before she could turn around to hex him or tell him off, Malfoy's laughter was interrupted by a hand on his shoulder. He stopped at once and looked up at the angry face of Professor Snape.

"Mr. Malfoy," Snape said coldly. "This potion is rather sensitive, and prone to exploding at the slightest mistake. You are dangerously close to causing two such explosions, with your antics. If you cannot sit behind Ms. Potter and Mr. Longbottom without distracting them, then maybe you and Mr. Goyle should trade places with Ms. Granger and Mr. Weasley?"

Malfoy's face registered confusion and hurt. Iliana remembered hearing somewhere that Snape was Malfoy's godfather, hence why he favored Malfoy so much. It also explained Malfoy's expression.

"I'll behave, Professor."

"I'm not so sure of that, Mr. Malfoy. When I said to trade with Granger and Weasley, that was not actually a suggestion."

"Yes, Professor," he said meekly, he and Goyle packing up their stuff to trade places. Luckily, everyone was still in the 'preparing ingredients' stage, which made moving easier.

Neville and Iliana looked at each other, shocked, but didn't speak in case Snape decided he had to be consistent for once.

"And Mr. Malfoy, ten points from Slytherin for endangering everyone in the room," Snape added before sitting down.

The room filled with low mutters at this, which Snape ignored for several minutes before looking up and silencing everyone without saying a word. Nobody could remember Snape ever taking points from a Slytherin before, except for that one time when Malfoy and Al had been trading hexes in the corridor before class.

Iliana glanced at Malfoy briefly. He looked stunned and betrayed, and was quietly cutting up his potions ingredients with a far-off look in his face.

Three-quarters of the way through the class, Karkaroff came into the room and was trying to talk to Snape.

"Later," they heard Snape hiss. "After class."

"W-what was that all about?" Neville asked her at dinner. "You know, with Snape and Malfoy? And then Snape and Karkaroff?"

"Yeah, Iliana, tell us," Ron said. Iliana had hung back after class pretending to have spilled something.

"I suspect the thing with Malfoy is because, well, Snape looked pissed at the Skeeter article this morning. I think he didn't realize I'd been neglected and stuff. And as for Karkaroff, he tried showing Snape something on his arm again. Said it was getting clearer, whatever that means."

Nobody looked like they had a clue.

 _ **I need to get some divination materials, maybe a tarot deck or something. See if there's a decent book at the bookstores in Hogsmeade to teach myself this stuff, because Trelawney is no help,**_ Al said in her head. _**Then maybe I can get some more information on stuff like this.**_

Dumbledore sat in his office, leaning his head on his hands, too tired and upset to work, even though he had much to do. So it didn't help his mood when his wards told him Professor Snape was coming up the stairs. He sighed heavily and sat up, ready for the knock.

When it came, he said, "Come in, Severus."

He'd been halfway through that sentence when the door started opening, slamming against the wall as he finished, making him wince despite himself. Severus came in and slammed the door shut with magic.

Coming over to Dumbledore's desk, he slammed the morning's paper on the desk, Skeeter's article visible.

"Is this _true_ , Dumbledore? Did you _really_ ignore Lily's wishes and put her child with her magic-hating sister Petunia and that horrible evil sack of lard she married?"

Dumbledore sighed wearily. "I'm afraid so, Severus."

Snape's fury climbed so high he had to speak through clenched teeth. "Why... of all the foolish things... would you do _that?"_

"Lily sacrificed her life to save Adira's life. I do not know how she managed it. I've heard of it happening before with lesser curses, of course, but never with the Killing Curse."

"And why is that relevant?"

"Because of her sacrifice, it enabled me to cast my own spell. A form of ritual magic, but one of the more Light-leaning ones. This ritual cast powerful magic to keep that sacrifice going. So long as Adira called the place where her mother's blood lived 'home,' she would be protected from Voldemort and his followers. And as to the insinuation of more physical forms of abuse, the ritual would have prevented that as well. Yes, they neglected Adira, and mistreated her, putting her through emotional abuse and the abuse of neglect. But they did not physically hurt her. Well, I suspect Dudley was able to hurt her, but I do not think the spell takes childhood bullying into account. Or 'took,' rather. When she became a ward of Hogwarts, she would no longer be calling her aunt's house home, and thus the spell would be broken. She is vulnerable to him and his people now. And as you keep insisting he is getting stronger, well..."

"I see," Severus said. "So it's true. You were a fool. And you didn't even check up on her?"

"Arabella Figg lived in the neighborhood. She still does, I believe, despite the fact the Potters do not anymore. I had Mrs. Figg keeping an eye on her. Apparently it was not good enough."

Speaking through his teeth again, Snape said, "Of _course_ it was not good enough, Dumbledore! Abusers can pretend to be perfectly decent people. They can hide the fact they are abusers from outsiders. Did it not worry you that she was dressing in extremely oversized clothes? Plainly they did that to hide how thin she had to have been, you realize?"

"The thought had occurred to me since I discovered the truth."

"They need to be prosecuted, Dumbledore! And you know the public is going to demand it! Fudge will jump on this chance to look better than you, especially with Lucius pushing him toward it. Which means the Dursleys will be brought in and prosecuted, probably under our laws. Tell me, do you think they will end up in Azkaban?"

"I do not know, Severus. Possibly. The dementors do affect Muggles as well, even though Muggles cannot see them."

"They'd deserve it. But you do realize they might come after _you_ next? And claiming ignorance will not help your situation; you should have known better in the first place, and you should have checked up on the child better! Made visits into the house! It might still have happened, but it would have been a little easier on her, as they would have had to give her better accommodations than a _cupboard under the stairs_!"

"I know, Severus!" Dumbledore said, sorrow making his voice crack. The twinkle in his blue eyes was gone now, replaced with the wet of tears. They did not fall, because he wiped them away with a handkerchief, but still they had been there.

"I know it was a mistake, Severus. I know I got so caught up in my own clever plan to protect Adira from Voldemort and his Death Eaters that I did not do a good enough job making sure she was alright. I know that I should have made her a ward of Hogwarts, or let her go to Andromeda Tonks, and just put them under every ward available. Hell, I could even have taken her in myself, to one of the properties my parents left me, and lived there with her, letting her be minded by someone trustworthy. I made grave miscalculations, Severus, I am aware of that. Every time I remember what happened to her, every time I recall what I have seen in their eyes over the years, it hurts my heart all over again. If I could go back in time and undo the mistake, I would. But I cannot. Time turners do not even go back that far; they cannot be _made_ to go back that far."

Dumbledore put his head on one of his hands, looking at Severus with a drawn and weary expression. Some of Snape's anger melted at the sight, but not most of it.

"I am starting to think that the people who say I am an old man losing my grip may have a point. I am doing too much, Severus. Headmaster of Hogwarts, teacher of alchemy classes, Supreme Mugwump of the ICW, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, occlumency lessons with the Potters, and recently I have begun doing research on Voldemort's past in hopes of putting a permanent end to him. I think perhaps I should start considering one or two of these things to retire from. Perhaps find someone else to be Chief Warlock or Supreme Mugwump. I have a few good candidates in mind for Supreme Mugwump, at the very least."

"If you feel that way, I could take over Potter's occlumency lessons for you. We have been getting along a little better lately."

"You have? How has this transpired, Severus?"

After a hesitation, Snape said, "I was impressed by their solution to the problem of keeping warm in the Black Lake, and even more impressed that they asked me permission to use the Potions lab and school ingredients they didn't have for the potion instead of just stealing things and brewing it secretly in a bathroom. When I picked Iliana's brain about my improvements to the potion, I was astounded at her intelligence and knowledge of potions ingredients. I realized I had been misjudging them, so I started to give her extra lessons. I later invited Miss Granger to join the classes too, since she was capable of brewing Polyjuice Potion in her second year."

Dumbledore's eyes twinkled a little again. "Really, Severus? I thought you hated teaching."

"I hate teaching _imbeciles,_ which describes the majority of the students I have to teach. Even Draco Malfoy is only slightly above the average in my class, despite the lessons I gave him before he came to Hogwarts."

"I see. And how would you describe the progress Miss Potter and Miss Granger are making?"

Snape paused a moment before speaking. "Miss Granger, for all her exceptional ability to follow directions and somehow manage to brew potions far beyond her years, is not terribly creative. I have at least managed to teach her to think about the directions and fix mistakes she spots, even make occasional improvements, though. She lacks creativity, though, as I said. She will some day be able to brew complex potions like the Wolfsbane Potion, but I doubt she'll be able to invent her own potions, not using her own ideas anyway.

"As to Iliana Potter, she's something else altogether. She's not as intellectual as Granger, has a harder time grasping some of the more complex concepts in potion-making that I've introduced her to, and is several years behind Granger, with her progress catching up being a bit slower than I had hoped. But she has the creativity that Miss Granger lacks. If I can get her up to Miss Granger's aptitude or higher, I would not be surprised if Iliana Potter invented an entirely new potion for her N.E.W.T. project, and went on to invent even more new potions, or making improvements to existing ones."

"So you predict she will get the high pass grade you expect from your N.E.W.T. students, in her O.W.L.s next year?"

"She has made enough progress since February that she could probably get an A+ if she took the O.W.L. in Potions today. Give me another year with her, and she'll easily achieve an E or even an O in the subject."

"High praise coming from you, Severus."

"Yes. But we have gotten off topic. What are you going to do about this?" he was pointing at the paper again.

Dumbledore sighed. "I will admit my mistake publicly. I will see if the Potters will say something sympathetic about my blunder for the press, though I will be speaking with someone other than Skeeter of course. But the point is I will admit my mistake. I will admit that I did not realize how bad Petunia and her husband were. I will admit that I presumed the fact she took Adira in meant she had forgiven her sister. I-"

"You didn't exactly give her much of a choice, from what Minerva told me. She said you just left the child on the stoop, and Minerva had to watch the child in her cat form, even though she'd already been there all day long. You left her on the stoop, in a basket, in November!"

"She had a warming charm and a blanket in the basket. And I put other spells on it, such as a don't-notice-me that was set to break when the door opened, as well as temporary protection wards using a bit of runic casting. She was safe, Severus."

"I see. Well the fact still remains, Petunia didn't really have a choice in the matter, did she?"

"The thing is, Severus, the way the spell works, Petunia would have had to feel at least a little love for Adira when she took her in, or the spell would not have locked into place. Which is part of why I was so shocked at the neglect in that household. I have a theory about why that was, of course. And of course Hogwarts would have protected the other students around her from the same thing happening, given the accidental nature of the thing," he said vaguely.

"What are you talking about, Dumbledore?"

Dumbledore looked up from his navel-gazing and turned to consider Severus instead, thinking for several more moments.

"I am sorry, Severus," he said at last, "but I cannot be more explicit yet. Voldemort is getting stronger. According to Adira, he is in a functional, if hideous, homunculus body, capable of wielding a wand and he is waiting to rise again. What he is waiting _for,_ I do not know. Given the rituals I know that are options for him, and given his last known location, I am rather surprised he hasn't already come back to life. Granted, some of the ingredients are hard to come by and even harder to brew properly, but he was in a homunculus body as early as August, and it is now the end of April. He has had eight whole months to rise again, yet he has not. It concerns me greatly.

"But getting back on track, I believe you offered to take over Adira's occlumency? I appreciate the offer, Severus, and I may take you up on it, but not yet. I want to have a couple more lessons with her before I pass her on to you."

"If you say so."

The two men sat staring at one another for a while longer.

"Was there something else, Severus?"

"What becomes of me if your plan of 'admitting your mistake' doesn't work? What if you are once more forced to step down as Headmaster?"

"Oh, that is not the only part of my plan. I believe I will step down as Supreme Mugwump of the ICW. Give me another day to think, and I believe I will have an acceptable replacement. Hopefully the two things together will mollify enough people."

"Do you not think it more possible people will assume that stepping down as Supreme Mugwump says you are not fit for your other positions too?"

"Perhaps. I may even retire from Chief Warlock if I can find an acceptable replacement there as well. But even if I must give up being Chief Warlock as well, I am too fond of Hogwarts to want to leave. Yes, actually that is the more important thing to step down from, as I abused that position to override the Potter will. I shall miss it, but at the same time I think it will be a relief. I had not been admitting it to myself, but it is rather a lot of work I've been doing lately, and I must reconsider my priorities given the Voldemort situation."

"The Dark Lord may be coming back, and your answer is to give yourself _less_ power?"

Dumbledore's expression changed to something odd, like a mix of humor and something like regret. "I have a very complicated relationship with power, Severus. More than I've ever told you. I will find replacements for those two positions, making sure that the replacements will be ones who stand with me against Voldemort when the time comes. And mollifying the people by stepping down from two such positions of power may make people more likely to believe me when Voldemort finally returns.

"Oh by the way, I believe Minerva does too much as well. Deputy Headmistress is a full time job on its own without being also Head of House and a teacher. From what I have heard, she doesn't give her students enough attention. You and the other two Heads of House gave career counseling back at the end of second year, did you not?"

"Yes. It is important in picking which extra courses to take."

"Indeed. And Minerva did not do such a thing. She hasn't for many years, not since becoming Deputy Headmistress. If you would send her up when you leave so she and I may discuss it, I would appreciate that."

"Are you going to demote her?" Snape looked torn between amusement and pity for the woman.

"No. Just going to try to convince her to give herself a little less work to do, as I plan to do."

"That is fraught with difficulty, Dumbledore. Say she steps down as Head of House Griffindor; who replaces her in that role? Do we even _have_ any other Griffindor Professors, aside from her and you?"

"An excellent point, Severus. Let's see... there is Hagrid, of course. But I do not believe he's quite suited to Head of House."

"Quite. He's even worse of a teacher than I am. And I doubt anyone else is qualified either. So she can't step down from Head of House, which means she'd either have to stop teaching, which would leave us a teacher short, or else step down as Deputy Headmistress. Of course, I could always take over as Deputy Headmaster."

"Or Filius could. But I suppose then he would have the same problem. As would you. Hmm... never mind, do not send Minerva up after all. I may talk to her at a later date, but for now, I will not. It requires a great deal more thought."

"I'll say."

"If there's nothing else, Severus, you may go now. I have work to do."

Snape nodded curtly and left the office. Dumbledore started to write a letter to his first choice to replace him as Supreme Mugwump.

The next day, Iliana spent most of the day with Luna and Javier, feeding the thestrals again. After dinner, though, she had an occlumency lesson with Dumbledore, which is why she found herself knocking on the door and being let in.

As soon as she had the door all the way open, she felt the assault of legilimency hit her, but that wasn't the surprising part.

Dumbledore had planned on testing her ability to resist legilimency when she wasn't expecting it, but was startled himself when he felt someone pin him down inside her mind and then ride the magical lines of force from his legilimency to invade _his_ mind instead. Dumbledore found himself helpless, unable to see anything in the Potter mind, while being bombarded by images from his own mind. He tried employing occlumency, which normally would have been an instant lockout, but he had been taken completely by surprise, and it wasn't exactly easy to occlude a mind that was using legilimency on someone else's mind.

Finally, though, Dumbledore managed to force his wand arm up and hit Iliana with a stinging hex, which broke the contact and sent them both reeling against the wall to keep from falling over.

"What was _that_?" Iliana asked, looking shaken.

"You mean you do not know? I thought you had laid a trap for me. I must say, it was impressive."

"I wouldn't know how to do something like that. LiiiiiYIKES!"

During the space of the blink of Dumbledore's eyes, Iliana changed into Hypatia. The white-haired black girl was regarding him coolly over her glasses.

"Fascinating. You were in love with Gellert Grindlewald, which is why it took you so long to finally bring him down. Your brother is the barman at The Hog's Head. Your sister, Ariana, was an obscurial who died trying to break up a fight between you and your brother. Ariana also killed your mother by accident. Unfortunately, that was all I could pull out of your mind before you hexed me."

"That was your doing?"

"Yes. I've been doing some reading about legilimency, thanks to a book I borrowed from Draco. All I can do with it so far is ride someone else's legilimency attempts, but give me time and I'll be a legitimate legilimens.

"On another note," she continued, "I've been making some modifications on the inside of the shared brainspace, and I think you'll find that even when we're all asleep – myself included – nothing is going to break through our mind. I've even located the source of the connection with Voldemort. I don't know anything about its nature, but it's based in this hideous scar, and it has tendrils going into our mind. I plan on studying it, to see if I can remove it, and copy the Parseltongue ability from it before I remove it. After all, I don't really see sudden debilitating migraines being a very effective early-warning system, seeing as pain can temporarily cripple people, in a manner of speaking."

"May I test your defenses without you reaching into my own mind again?"

"Sure. I doubt the same trick would work twice."

Still wary, Dumbledore lifted his wand. " _Legilimens._ "

At first, it looked like she'd not put up any defenses at all. Images came into his mind, images that fit what he knew of Hypatia, and even images that fit some of the others. But she remained standing there looking placidly at him as he invaded her mind, which made him suspicious. He kept digging around for a few more minutes, trying to pull up memories of the Dursleys or other powerfully emotional events. This is when he saw the first real sign of something odd, for the memories of the Dursleys were clearly faked. They were _good_ fakes, but seeing as they depicted an ordinary life with Dursleys who were maybe a bit stand-offish but otherwise took good care of Adira when she was Harry, that was sort of a dead giveaway that it was a lie.

He tried probing for the talk of horcruxes he knew he'd had with Alastair last year, but couldn't find any reference to it, nor the word anywhere in her memory. In fact, the only instance of them coming up to his office that he could find at all was the two times they'd been up here in second year.

Trying a different tack, he probed for memories of Luna Lovegood. What he saw in her mind suggested they were friends, maybe a little more innocently physical than with other friends (such as hugs and hand-holding), but nothing to suggest a romantic relationship.

The last thing Dumbledore found before giving up was that there was no sign of Mother at all, either. And Hypatia's own memories did not contain any mention of Draco Malfoy, the incident that had caused her to be discovered, or any mention of ritual magic or anything else that wasn't approved. So he finally broke the connection.

"You used your unique ability to reprogram your own brain, I see, becoming a perfect occlumens in the space of several weeks."

"Yes. It wasn't difficult. I didn't bother when I was hiding because it would be very suspicious and might have given me away, but now the kneazle is out of the bag, it was a simple matter to construct a false memory and hide our actual thoughts and memories behind it. Of course, the version that is usually there contains no suggestion of my own existence."

"I do not doubt it. Well, that gives me one less thing to do."

"Likewise," she said. "But now I expect you to be completely honest with me. And if I have to become the most powerful legilimens in the world to pry the truth out of you, I will be rather annoyed. And you know what I am capable of when roused."

"You are still a child, though. Especially when compared to me. Do not forget that no matter what you are capable of, I am capable of far more. So let us dispense with the threats."

"Are you going to be honest with us?"

"I have always been honest with you."

She frowned. "Not telling any blatant lies, but still hiding things from people, that is _not_ the same as being honest."

"I have told you about the horcruxes. I have told you of the prophecy before your birth, about you and Voldemort. What more do you think I'm hiding from you?"

"You know what this is," she said, pointing at the scar. It wasn't a question.

"I have some theories, yes."

"Tell me your theories, then."

"I am sorry, Hypatia, but I cannot do that. I'm far from certain, and you are yet too young."

"You told us of horcruxes, and the prophecy."

"Yes, but that's different. This... I do not even like thinking about it myself. To tell it to you would be too great a burden on your young mind. I cannot-"

Symbols suddenly appeared all over Hypatia's body, causing him to stop in his tracks.

" _One word._ One word is all it would take to activate a purposefully-botched ritual magic spell that would kill me instantly. It doesn't even have to be spoken. And there's also a dead-man switch in my head I've set up. Stun me and it goes off. Confund me or Obliviate me and it goes off. You. Will. Tell. Me. Your. Theories, Dumbledore. _NOW._ "

Dumbledore froze. She had to be bluffing, right? She wouldn't do that to herself, to the others, would she? Far from mere suicide, it would be murder! But he supposed she _could_ if she wanted to. He tried deciphering the symbols-

"Five."

"Five?" he asked, confused.

"Four, three, two-"

"You are a horcrux!" he blurted out, terrified.

She froze, regarding him with cold, amber eyes. Then she smiled. "Better. Now explain."

He relaxed a little, shaking, composing himself for a moment before speaking.

"I believe," he said at last, "that Voldemort made at least three horcruxes. The more horcruxes one makes, the more one destabilizes one's soul. I do not know what Lily did to save your life. I suspect some sort of ritual magic, as there are some rituals that can use the power of a willing sacrifice to save others from lesser curses, and your parents _did_ die on Halloween, the night when the veil between our world and the world of the dead is thinnest, but none of the rituals I know of have ever worked against the Killing Curse.

"Whatever your mother did to save you, it worked. Because he had horcruxes, Voldemort did not die, but became a wraith instead. In the explosion of his curse backfiring on him, I suspect part of his soul broke off by accident and attached itself to the only living thing it could find: you. He was probably preparing to use your death to make his next horcrux, but then his curse backfired on him. Since it is not a proper horcrux, it is not nearly as full of dark magic as they usually are. But it may have been influencing the Dursleys to be more horrible than usual, since they already did not like you. And before you ask, the protections Hogwarts has would likely have protected your friends and loved ones from its influence, if indeed it is influencing people who love you at all. Or perhaps your mind has somehow built mental scar tissue over the thing, I do not know.

"Now please, I have told you all I know, except for my research into Voldemort, which isn't complete and would take days or weeks to relate to you in any case, and I was already planning to tell you that research as soon as you could occlude your mind. So will you please remove those symbols?"

Hypatia was grinning, her eyes watering as she wiped the symbols from her body. "You actually believed me. I bluffed you, and you bought it!" She burst into the tears that were her form of laughter, grinning and leaning against the wall as she did.

It was Dumbledore's turn to grow cold with fury. "What do you mean?"

When she calmed down and finished wiping her eyes, she said, "Like Mother would have let me do _any_ of that! I'm reasonably sure She can read my mind at all times whether I want Her to or not. If I planned to kill myself for real, or to threaten it and mean it, She would have stopped me, shut me down, and shoved me so far down into the Basement that even She would have a hard time finding me. And I would never hurt Chandra, or put myself willingly into a situation where he might get hurt. Also, I'm not a monster. So wow, I honestly did _not_ expect that to work! And here I thought you were intelligent enough to not be fooled by that!"

"It would appear Mr. Malfoy was right," Dumbledore said, his voice colder than the breeze coming off an Antarctic glacier, "you are indeed a Slytherin. A week's worth of detentions for threatening the life of a student."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Fine by me."

"You say that now, but just you wait. You will be here, every night. You, not any of the others. And you will _not_ be enjoying the experience either. I will think of something sufficient by tomorrow. In fact, I already have some ideas. Come to my office tomorrow after dinner. You are excused now."

Hypatia shrugged, and switched back to Iliana with no glow at all. Dumbledore, despite his frayed nerves, noticed they'd been doing that almost every time now. Iliana looked back at Dumbledore as though apologizing to him for Hypatia with her expression, but he just gestured her away impatiently, so she opened the door and left.

"Well I say," said the snide voice of the portrait of former headmaster Phineas Nigellus, "I've never seen a student more full of herself and carried away with her own cleverness before. You need to find a way to reign her in, Dumbledore."

"Not now, Phineas. I am weary."

"Fine. Later, then."

Dumbledore sighed, deciding to retire early for the night. He needed to relax for a while after that whole fiasco.

Hypatia came back the next night after dinner for her first night of her detentions. She was trying not to look too cocky, but it was difficult; Dumbledore was a big softy, she doubted any detention with him would be more than mildly annoying.

Dumbledore had her sit at the chair in front of his desk, where she found she was stuck with a sticking charm. He then had her give him her wands, which he set on the desk out of her reach, and cast _Silencio_ on her. She rolled her eyes at him.

"You will sit there watching me read restricted books about horcruxes, ritual magic, runic casting, and other dark arts, unable to ask questions, knowing I will not be letting you look at or copy the books, all while sitting in uncomfortable silence."

Her eyes going wide told Dumbledore his punishment was on the nose. Smiling, he sat down and started pretending to read "Secrets of the Darkest Art," the book about horcruxes. Every now and then, he would say things like "Hmm," or "Interesting," or even pull faces at the more gruesome details he could recall from memory, or illustrations he had forgotten about. All the time, he paid enough attention to Hypatia to know she was in a great deal of suffering, her own curiosity and frustration being the worst punishment possible for her. Several times he caught her raking her fingers across her face or pulling her own hair in frustration. She even broke down laughing, though no sound came out of her of course.

Thus, after four hours, by which time she was just staring forlornly at the book he was 'reading,' he finally let her go. Four hours, but to her it had felt like twelve. It didn't get any easier the other six nights of her detention, either. By the end of the fifth night, she was crying _and_ laughing, trying desperately and futilely to get out of the chair or move it, her face ending up a complete mess from the tears. On the sixth night, Dumbledore had to glare warningly at her when she attempted to transform to someone else, which she failed at because nobody was there to transform _to._ (The others had vanished to the Basement for each of these detentions after the first 15 minutes of the first one.) When Dumbledore let her go that last night, she ran out of the room without even transforming first, only switching with Al just before passing the gargoyle.

Al thought the whole thing was extremely amusing. Though trying to explain to Ron and Hermione where they were every night had been bothersome. He wasn't sure Hermione bought their explanation that their occlumency lessons were every night this week.

The start of the summer term would normally have meant that Iliana was training hard for the last Quidditch match of the season. This year, however, it was the third and final task in the Triwizard Tournament for which they needed to prepare, but they still didn't know what they would have to do. Finally, on May 10th, Professor McGonagall came up to Al at breakfast.

"You are to go down to the Quidditch field tonight at nine o'clock, Potter," she told him. "Mr. Bagman will be there to tell the champions about the third task."

So at half past eight that night, Al left Ron and Hermione in Gryffindor Tower and went downstairs. As he crossed the entrance hall, Cedric came up from the Hufflepuff common room.

"What d'you reckon it's going to be?" he asked Al as they went together down the stone steps, out into the cloudy night. "Fleur keeps going on about a spaceship; reckons we'll have to retrieve the Triwizard Cup from the moon."

They walked down the dark lawn to the Quidditch stadium, turned through a gap in the stands, and walked out onto the field.

"What've they done to it?" Cedric said indignantly, stopping dead.

There was something huge, like a small skyscraper, being built in the middle of the Quidditch pitch. Wizards and witches were floating pieces up into place from the ground while wizards on brooms attached the pieces or cast spells on them. It looked like it was hollow, though, as there weren't any floors but the one holding the whole thing up.

"Bugger if I know," Al said.

"Hello there!" called a cheery voice.

Ludo Bagman was standing outside the field, well outside of the hard-hat zone with Krum and Fleur. Al and Cedric made their way toward them, climbing over the hedges. Fleur beamed at Al as he came nearer. Her attitude toward them had changed completely since they'd saved her sister from the lake.

"Well, what d'you think?" Bagman asked.

"I have no bloody idea," Al said.

"Nor I," said Krum. Fleur and Cedric shrugged.

"Well perhaps it isn't plain yet, but well, we're going to do a maze! The inside will be bigger than the outside, and the outside walls will let the viewers see each of the champions and the section of the maze you're in, while none of you will be able to see out.

"Once inside, you navigate the maze to find the top, where the Triwizard Cup will be waiting for your. First person to touch it gets transported down to the front of the building where the celebration will begin!"

"That's it? Just navigate a maze?" Cedric asked. Al rolled his eyes.

"There will be obstacles," said Bagman happily, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Hagrid is providing a number of creatures … then there will be spells that must be broken … all that sort of thing, you know. Now, the champion who is leading on points will get a head start into the maze." Bagman grinned at Krum. "Then Mr. Diggory will enter, then Mr. Potter, then Miss Delacour. But you'll all be in with a fighting chance, depending how well you get past the obstacles. Should be fun, eh?"

Al, who knew only too well the kind of creatures that Hagrid was likely to provide for an event like this, said, "Oh yeah! As fun as a barrel of blast-ended skrewts." Cedric snickered.

Looking confused for a moment first, Bagman asked, "Any questions? No? Very well … if you haven't got any questions, we'll go back up to the castle, shall we, it's a bit chilly."

Bagman hurried alongside Al as they began to walk away from the maze-building in progress. Al had the feeling that Bagman was going to start offering to help him again, but just then, Krum tapped Al on the shoulder.

"Could I haff a vord?"

"Out here in the dark when some evil jerk put our names in the stupid wooden Shotglass of Flaming Shite? No thank you. We can talk when we get inside the castle."

"Fine. Vill you let me valk vith you?"

"It's no skin off my nose. That means yes," Al clarified, and the two boys started walking again. "What's up?"

"Vell, I was just vondering if there is anything between Herm-oh-ninny and Ron Veasley."

Al pulled a face. "I sure hope not. I like Ron, I do, but Hermione is so far out of his league it's not even funny. And even though they're friends, he still treats her a bit shitty at times. Anyway, I haven't noticed anything lately. I mean, I think he might fancy her, but honestly, she's pretty fanciable. None of us have any interest in her that way, we think of her like a sister, but we can see where someone would fancy her. She's intelligent, clever, witty, and she's starting to really win the puberty lottery lately.

"About the only sticking point I can think of between the two of you is that she's like, three years younger than you, and still a minor. But I guess as long as you don't do anything beyond talk or hug or hold hands before she's of age, that's not much of an issue. But if I find you've taken advantage of her, I'll transfigure your mouth to your anus, you hear me?"

Krum, looking scared, nodded. "I understand. I vill not take advantage of her. You have my vord."

"Good. Now if you're looking for advice-"

Al heard something to the side, and noticed that they'd wandered too close to the Forbidden Forest. Something moved behind Krum in the trees, and Al, who had some experience of the sort of thing that lurked in the forest, instinctively grabbed Krum's arm and pulled him around, whipping his wand out and directing it at the trees.

"Vot is it?"

Al shook his head, staring at the place where he'd seen movement.

Suddenly a man staggered out from behind a tall oak. Al had never seen the man before, whoever he was. He looked as though he had been traveling for days. The knees of his robes were ripped and bloody, his face scratched; he was unshaven and gray with exhaustion. His hair and mustache were both in need of a wash and a trim. His strange appearance, however, was nothing to the way he was behaving. Muttering and gesticulating, the man appeared to be talking to someone that he alone could see. He reminded Al vividly of an old tramp he had seen once when out shopping with the Dursleys. That man too had been conversing wildly with thin air; Aunt Petunia had seized Dudley's hand and pulled him across the road to avoid him; Uncle Vernon had then treated the family to a long rant about what he would like to do with beggars and vagrants.

"Who is he?" Krum asked, backing up, his own wand out.

"No idea. Never seen him before. But he doesn't have his wand out."

"Yet," Krum added.

"Yes, that's a good point. What should we do?"

Al paused and shushed Krum, because he could hear the man talking to a tree.

"...and when you've done that, Jacobs, send an owl to Dumbledore confirming the number of Durmstrang students who will be attending the tournament, Karkaroff has just sent word there will be twelve."

"Wait a minute," Al said, things locking into place in his head. "Mr. Crouch?"

"Who is Mr. Crouch?"

"If it's him, Mr. Crouch is the former head of our Department of International Magical Cooperation."

"… and then send another owl to Madame Maxime, because she might want to up the number of students she's bringing, now Karkaroff's made it a round dozen … do that, Jacobs, will you? Will you? Will …"

Mr. Crouch's eyes were bulging. He stood staring at the tree, muttering soundlessly at it. Then he staggered sideways and fell to his knees.

"Mr. Crouch?" Al said loudly. "Are you all right?"

Crouch's eyes were rolling in his head. Al looked around at Krum, who had followed him to the edge of the trees, and was looking down at Crouch in alarm.

"Vot is wrong with him?"

"No idea," Al muttered. "But I'm gonna try to get Dumbledore down here. _Expecto Patronum!_ "

The three-headed Runespoor snake patronus formed, waiting for instructions.

"Go tell Dumbledore to come to the Forbidden Forest," he told it. "Tell him Mr. Crouch is here, and he's gone crazy, his movements jerky and talking to trees like they're people he knows. Go!"

The Runespoor patronus flew off toward the castle.

"In the meantime, _Expelliarmus!_ "

The spell did nothing to Mr. Crouch except thwart his attempt to right himself by pushing him back against the ground.

"Dumbledore!" gasped Mr. Crouch. He got up again and reached out to try to grab Al's robes, but Al leaped back even further. "I need … see … Dumbledore."

"Yeah, I just sent him a message, he should- hey, speak of the devil."

It was not the devil, nor Dumbledore, but a phoenix patronus.

"Wait there," it said in Dumbledore's voice. "Do not move. Have your wand out. Be vigilant, and I will be there soon."

As it faded, he turned his attention back to Mr. Crouch.

"I've done … stupid … thing …" Mr. Crouch breathed. He looked utterly mad. His eyes were rolling and bulging, and a trickle of spittle was sliding down his chin. Every word he spoke seemed to cost him a terrible effort. "Must … tell … Dumbledore …"

"Yeah yeah, he'll be here in a few minutes. Don't worry."

"Who … you?" he whispered.

"I'm a student at the school," Al said.

"You're not … _his_?" whispered Crouch, his mouth sagging.

"Who's?"

"Dumbledore's?"

"Well I've summoned Dumbledore, if that's what you mean. And he's my headmaster, so yes, I suppose I _am_ his."

Crouch crawled closer to Al and Krum. Krum stepped back, but Al didn't, this time.

"Warn … Dumbledore …"

"Warn him of what?"

"Thank you, Jacobs, and when you have done that, I would like a cup of tea. My wife and son will be arriving shortly, we are attending a concert tonight with Mr. and Mrs. Fudge."

Crouch was now talking fluently to a tree again, and seemed completely unaware that Al was there.

"Yes, my son has recently gained twelve O.W.L.s, most satisfactory, yes, thank you, yes, very proud indeed. Now, if you could bring me that memo from the Andorran Minister of Magic, I think I will have time to draft a response."

"Nuttier than a collision between a fruitcake schooner and a nut barge," Al said, shaking his head.

"He is quite mad, yes," Krum said, sounding scared. "I hope he does not attack us."

Al started to walk back a few steps from Crouch, but the man came at him so fast he had Al's robes in his hands before Al could react.

"Don't … leave … me!" he whispered, his eyes bulging again. "I … escaped … must warn … must tell … see Dumbledore … my fault … all my fault … Bertha … dead … all my fault … my son … my fault … tell Dumbledore … Harry Potter … the Dark Lord … stronger … Harry Potter …"

"Get. OFF. Me!" Al said, hitting the man's hands with a Stinging Hex. The man yowled and let go.

There was a sudden loud sound behind them, and they both turned around to look, but nothing was there. Then red light hit them from behind and they blacked out.

When Al's eyes opened up, he saw Dumbledore looking down at him with concern.

"Are you alright, Alastair?"

"Peachy," Al said, rubbing his head and looking around. "How's Krum?"

"I am avake," the slavic boy answered.

"Alastair, Viktor, do either of you know where Mr. Crouch is?"

Al looked around in a panic. "He's gone!? Dammit! Whoever hexed us from behind when that noise distracted us must've got him and dragged him off somewhere. How long did it take you to get down here?"

"Though I came as quickly as I could, I was in the bathtub when I got your message. So it has been about ten minutes."

"Damn."

"What did Mr. Crouch say, Al?"

"He wasn't acting normally. He didn't seem to know where he was. He kept talking like someone named Jacobs was there. Possibly a secretary or assistant? Then his whole aspect would change and he'd seem like he was saner, but struggling to get a message out."

"Did anyone besides the two of you see him?"

"Well presumably the berk who stunned us saw him, unless that was Crouch, but other than that, no idea. I don't think so."

"What happened? How did this begin?"

"Krum and I were talking, Mr. Bagman had just finished telling us about the third task, we stayed behind, and then we saw Mr. Crouch coming out of the forest. I summoned you with my patronus, then someone sneaked behind us and stunned us with a non-verbal spell."

"Where was he standing?"

"He vas over there," Krum said, pointing. "Then he fell down. Alastair tried to disarm him in case he vas armed, but it just pushed him into the ground."

The sound of thunderous footfalls reached them, and Hagrid came panting into sight with Fang at his heels. Dumbledore must have summoned Hagrid while they were out. Hagrid was carrying his crossbow.

"Professor Dumbledore!" he said, his eyes widening. "Al! What the-"

"Hagrid, I need you to fetch Professor Karkaroff," said Dumbledore. "His student has been attacked. When you've done that, kindly alert Professor Moody —"

"No need, Dumbledore," said a wheezy growl. "I'm here."

Moody was limping toward them, leaning on his staff, his wand lit.

"Damn leg," he said furiously. "Would've been here quicker. Happened to be walking in front of a window and saw the two boys out cold in the grass with my eye."

"Did you see the culprit? Or Mr. Crouch?"

"Crouch was here? Anyway no, I didn't see anyone else. I started heading downstairs at once, but I guess you beat me here."

"Crouch?" said Hagrid blankly.

"Karkaroff, please, Hagrid!" said Dumbledore sharply.

"Oh yeah … right y'are, Professor …" said Hagrid, and he turned and disappeared into the dark trees, Fang trotting after him.

"I don't know where Barty Crouch is," Dumbledore told Moody, "but it is essential that we find him."

"I'm onto it," growled Moody, and he pulled out his wand and limped off into the forest.

Neither Dumbledore nor Al spoke again until they heard the unmistakable sounds of Hagrid and Fang returning. Karkaroff was hurrying along behind them. He was wearing his sleek silver furs, and he looked pale and agitated.

"What is this?" he cried when he saw Krum on the ground and Dumbledore and Al beside him. "What's going on?"

"I vos attacked!" said Krum, sitting up now and rubbing his head. "Mr. Crouch or votever his name —"

"Crouch attacked you? _Crouch_ attacked you? The former director of the Department of International Magical Cooperation?"

"Igor," Dumbledore began, but Karkaroff had drawn himself up, clutching his furs around him, looking livid.

"Treachery!" he bellowed, pointing at Dumbledore. "It is a plot! You and your Ministry of Magic have lured me here under false pretenses, Dumbledore! This is not an equal competition! First you sneak Potter into the tournament, though he is underage! Now one of your Ministry friends attempts to put _my_ champion out of action! I smell double-dealing and corruption in this whole affair, and you, Dumbledore, you, with your talk of closer international wizarding links, of rebuilding old ties, of forgetting old differences — here's what I think of _you_!"

Karkaroff spat onto the ground at Dumbledore's feet. In one swift movement, Hagrid seized the front of Karkaroff's furs, lifted him into the air, and slammed him against a nearby tree.

"Apologize!" Hagrid snarled as Karkaroff gasped for breath, Hagrid's massive fist at his throat, his feet dangling in midair.

"Hagrid, _no_!" Dumbledore shouted, his eyes flashing.

Hagrid removed the hand pinning Karkaroff to the tree, and Karkaroff slid all the way down the trunk and slumped in a huddle at its roots; a few twigs and leaves showered down upon his head.

"We don't know it was Crouch. We were distracted by another noise and got stunned non-verbally. When we woke up, Crouch was gone and Dumbledore was here."

"Kindly escort Alastair back up to the castle, Hagrid," said Dumbledore sharply.

Breathing heavily, Hagrid gave Karkaroff a glowering look.

"Maybe I'd better stay here, Headmaster. …"

"You will take Alastair back to school, Hagrid," Dumbledore repeated firmly. "Take him right up to Gryffindor Tower. And Alastair — I want you to stay there. You may speak with Sirius on your two-way mirror, but do not leave the Griffindor dorms unless it is an emergency. Do you understand?"

"You don't have to tell _me_ twice, sir."

"I'll leave Fang with yeh, Headmaster," Hagrid said, staring menacingly at Karkaroff, who was still sprawled at the foot of the tree, tangled in furs and tree roots. "Stay, Fang. C'mon, Al."

They marched in silence past the Beauxbatons carriage and up toward the castle.

"How dare he," Hagrid growled as they strode past the lake. "How dare he accuse Dumbledore. Like Dumbledore'd do anythin' like that. Like Dumbledore wanted _you_ in the tournament in the firs' place. Worried! I dunno when I seen Dumbledore more worried than he's bin lately. An' you!" Hagrid suddenly said angrily to Al, who looked up at him, taken aback. "What were yeh doin', wanderin' off with ruddy Krum? He's from Durmstrang, Al! Coulda jinxed yeh right there, couldn' he? Hasn' Moody taught yeh nothin'? 'Magine lettin' him lure yeh off on yer own —"

"He's a good person! I can tell, in most cases, and he's an open book to me. He wasn't trying to hurt us, he was asking about Ron and Hermione."

"I'll be havin' a few words with her, an' all," said Hagrid grimly, stomping up the stairs. "The less you lot 'ave ter do with these foreigners, the happier yeh'll be. Yeh can' trust any of 'em."

"You're just sore Maxime broke up with you after you outed her heritage. Honestly, Hagrid, anyone could have heard you, and they did! Ron apparently overheard you as well, not just that horrible Skeeter person. Did you honestly expect Madame Maxime would be okay with you shouting about it like that?"

"Don' you talk ter me abou' her!" said Hagrid, and he looked quite frightening for a moment. "She only wanted me help findin' out what the tasks were! Now she's tryin' ter get back in me good books, tryin' ter get me ter tell her what's comin' in the third task. Ha! You can' trust any of 'em!"

Al noticed Hagrid had ignored his comment. Al said nothing; Hagrid was in a fouler temper than he'd ever seen before, and he was quite glad to be out of his company when they got to the Fat Lady's portrait. He clambered through the portrait hole into the common room and hurried straight upstairs to get his two-way mirror, then straight for the corner where Ron and Hermione were sitting, to tell them what had happened.

Al, Ron, Hermione, and Sirius had been up all night talking about Crouch. Even with seeking input from the other members of the Potter collective, nobody knew a thing because none of them had noticed anything Al hadn't already. Sirius had a fair bit of information for them from months of looking into old newspapers and reading books about the end of the last war, but in the end it didn't help them much. The only really possibly useful tidbit was that Sirius had known Bertha Jorkins at school, and he said she'd had a great memory for gossip, contradicting other people's assessment of her as being forgetful.

They didn't know what Crouch had been trying to warn Dumbledore about other than Voldemort getting stronger, which Dumbledore already knew, and they couldn't figure out who had stunned him and Krum, nor why the mysterious person would stun them and scarper with Crouch. What was worse, they didn't know _how_ he'd escaped. And by the time they thought to check the Marauder's Map, there was nobody left in the Forbidden Forest or surrounding area. Not even Moody had had any better luck, when they asked him about it in the morning, and by the look of his face, he'd been up all night looking for Crouch.

"What I don't get," Al said as they left Moody behind, "is why Krum and I only got stunned. Whoever scarpered with Crouch could've killed us and still done a runner, he caught us by surprise after all. Even if he killed us after stunning us!"

"Obviously whoever it is, Al, is the person who put your name in the Goblet of Fire, so they wanted it to look like an accident," Hermione said, "And they can hardly make it look like an accident if they murder you in the Forbidden Forest!"

"But why? If they're willing to make off with Crouch, presumably killing him, why not me as well?"

"Maybe he was afraid Moody would see him?" Ron suggested.

"In that case, why risk attacking Crouch at all? No, something is rotten in the school of Hogwarts. I'm missing something important. Damn! I really need to get a tarot deck!"

Hermione rolled her eyes.

"Hermione, I am a legitimate Seer, even if I've only managed one vision, and Chandra says I should try other divination methods. Tarot sounds the easiest to me, from the books the library has on the subject. But I still need a tarot deck."

"Al, I don't understand it either," said Hermione desperately. "I just know there are a lot of odd things going on, and I don't like it, but I doubt casting bones or reading tea leaves is going to help. … Moody's right — Sirius is right — you've got to get in training for the third task, straight away. And you make sure you write back to Sirius and promise him you're not going to go sneaking off alone again."

"I can do both," Al said in a snit.

The Hogwarts grounds never looked more inviting than when Adira and the others had to stay indoors. For the next few days they spent all of their free time either in the library with Hermione and Ron looking up hexes, or else in the Room of Requirement, which they were using for spell practice.

It had now been a week since Crouch's strange appearance and disappearance on the grounds, and they were just finishing off practicing useful spells before Adira had Divination.

"See you at dinner!" said Hermione after the bell rang, and she set off for Arithmancy, while Adira and Ron headed toward North Tower, and Divination. Broad strips of dazzling gold sunlight fell across the corridor from the high windows. The sky outside was so brightly blue it looked as though it had been enameled.

"It's going to be boiling in Trelawney's room, she never puts out that fire," said Ron as they started up the staircase toward the silver ladder and the trapdoor.

He was quite right. The dimly lit room was swelteringly hot. The fumes from the perfumed fire were heavier than ever. Adira's head swam as she made her way over to one of the curtained windows. While Professor Trelawney was looking the other way, disentangling her shawl from a lamp, Adira opened the window an inch or so and settled back in his chintz armchair, so that a soft breeze played across her face. It was extremely comfortable.

The teacher was droning on about something, Addy wasn't paying attention anymore since the woman was pants at teaching anything useful. She dimmed the lights for some reason, and Adira let the heavily perfumed fumes washed over her, and the breeze from the window played across her face. She could hear an insect humming gently somewhere behind the curtain. Her eyelids began to droop.

She was riding on the back of an eagle owl, soaring through the clear blue sky toward an old, ivy-covered house set high on a hillside. Lower and lower they flew, the wind blowing pleasantly in her face, until they reached a dark and broken window in the upper story of the house and entered. Now they were flying along a gloomy passageway, to a room at the very end … through the door they went, into a dark room whose windows were boarded up.

Addy had left the owl's back … she was watching, now, as it fluttered across the room, into a chair with its back to him. … There were two dark shapes on the floor beside the chair … both of them were stirring. …

One was a huge snake … the other was a woman … Addy couldn't see the woman well enough to recognize her or not … she was down on the hearth rug, her breathing heavy, her attitude like she'd just had an orgasm even though she was still clothed.

"You are in luck, my dear," said a cold, high-pitched voice from the depths of the chair in which the owl had landed. "You are very fortunate indeed. Your blunder has not ruined everything. He is dead."

"My Lord!" purred the woman on the floor. It sounded erotic, nearly obscene. "My Lord, I am … I am so pleased … and so sorry to have displeased you."

"Nagini," said the cold voice, "you are out of luck. I will not be feeding anyone to you, after all … but never mind, never mind … there is still the Potter freak."

The snake hissed. Adira could see its tongue fluttering.

"Now, my dear," said the cold voice, "that is enough for one day, I think."

"My Lord … no … I beg you … Please, do it again! I need to be punished!"

The cold voice sighed, then chuckled. "Well you are quite the odd one, aren't you? But then I knew that when I recruited you. Fine, then, but just the one last time. I do not want to cause you any permanent damage."

The tip of a wand emerged from around the back of the chair. It was pointing at the woman.

" _Crucio_!" said the cold voice.

The woman screamed, screamed as though every nerve in her body were on fire, the screaming filled Adira's ears as the scar on her forehead seared with pain; Addy was yelling too. … Voldemort would hear her, would know she was there.

"Adira! Addy, wake up!"

She opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor of Professor Trelawney's room with her hands over her face. Her scar was still burning so badly that her eyes were watering. The pain had been real. The whole class was standing around him, and Ron was kneeling next to him, looking terrified.

"You all right?" he said.

"Of course she isn't!" said Professor Trelawney, looking thoroughly excited. Her great eyes loomed over Adira, gazing at her. "What was it, Potter? A premonition? An apparition? What did you see?"

"Nothing," she said. "Just a nightmare. I fell asleep in class. I have nightmares quite often."

"You were clutching your scar!" said Professor Trelawney. "You were rolling on the floor, clutching your scar! Come now, Potter, I have experience in these matters!"

Adira felt Al's anger surge. "You have about as much experience with fortune telling as I have with performing brain surgery! I had a headache and a nightmare at the same time; it's a coincidence, nothing more. I just need to get a headache cure from the hospital wing."

"My dear, you were undoubtedly stimulated by the extraordinary clairvoyant vibrations of my room!" said Professor Trelawney "If you leave now, you may lose the opportunity to see further than you have ever-"

But their patience with her had evaporated, and Addy rushed out of the room at top speed without another word until she got to the hospital wing. But when she got to the bottom of the ladder, she didn't go to the hospital wing. Aside from the fact the headache was already fading, she knew what she had to do when her scar was hurting. Checking first to make sure she had her two-way mirror in the pouch around her neck, she went instead to Dumbledore's office, trying to remember the details of the dream as she did.

She had walked right past the stone gargoyle guarding the entrance to Dumbledore's office without noticing. She blinked, looked around, realized what she had done, and retraced her steps, stopping in front of it. Then she remembered that she didn't know the password.

"Tell Dumbledore I'm here, will you? It's urgent."

The gargoyle wasn't feeling cooperative today, and raised an eyebrow at her.

"You're gonna be that way, then, are you? Fine. Sherbet lemon?" she tried tentatively.

The gargoyle did not move.

"Okay," said Addy, staring at it, "Pear Drop. Er — Licorice Wand. Fizzing Whizbee. Drooble's Best Blowing Gum. Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans … oh no, he doesn't like them, does he? … oh just open, can't you?" she said angrily. "I really need to see him, it's urgent!"

The gargoyle remained immovable.

She kicked it, achieving nothing but an excruciating pain in her big toe.

"Chocolate Frog!" she yelled angrily, standing on one leg. "Sugar Quill! Cockroach Cluster!"

The gargoyle sprang to life and jumped aside. Addy blinked in surprise.

"What the-? Gods, whatever." She sighed, and went in. Just before she got on the stairs, though, she turned to face the gargoyle's back and said, "you know, to be honest, it's kind of stupid that I can just guess passwords at random until I get the right one. Do you know, some Muggle computers will cheerfully ignore even the correct password if someone has to guess more than a few times?"

There was no response, so she huffed and got on the spiral stone staircase, which moved slowly upward until she got to the polished oak door with a brass door knocker.

She could hear voices from inside the office. She stepped off the moving staircase and hesitated, listening.

"Dumbledore, I'm afraid I don't see the connection, don't see it at all!" It was the voice of the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge. "Ludo says Bertha's perfectly capable of getting herself lost. I agree we would have expected to have found her by now, but all the same, we've no evidence of foul play, Dumbledore, none at all. As for her disappearance being linked with Barty Crouch's!"

"And what do you thinks happened to Barty Crouch, Minister?" said Moody's growling voice.

"I see two possibilities, Alastor," said Fudge. "Either Crouch has finally cracked — more than likely, I'm sure you'll agree, given his personal history — lost his mind, and gone wandering off somewhere —"

"He wandered extremely quickly, if that is the case, Cornelius," said Dumbledore calmly.

"Or else — well …" Fudge sounded embarrassed. "Well, I'll reserve judgment until after I've seen the place where he was found, but you say it was just past the Beauxbatons carriage? Dumbledore, you know what that woman _is_?"

"I consider her to be a very able headmistress — and an excellent dancer," said Dumbledore quietly.

"Dumbledore, come!" said Fudge angrily. "Don't you think you might be prejudiced in her favor because of Hagrid? They don't all turn out harmless — if, indeed, you can call Hagrid harmless, with that monster fixation he's got —"

"I no more suspect Madame Maxime than Hagrid," said Dumbledore, just as calmly. "I think it possible that it is _you_ who are prejudiced, Cornelius."

"Can we wrap up this discussion?" growled Moody.

"Yes, yes, let's go down to the grounds, then," said Fudge impatiently.

"No, it's not that," said Moody, "it's just that Potter wants a word with you, Dumbledore. She's just outside the door."

Endnotes: Both Hypatia's fake threat and Skeeter telling the world about the neglect by the Dursleys was a bit of a surprise to me, and I had to think about whether or not I wanted to keep it, hence the wait. Obviously I decided to keep it.

Bah, I just noticed I had a scene in a previous chapter that referenced the Dark Mark going up in the sky, but that didn't happen in this fic. Instead, there was a fight with the Death Eaters. I'll fix it later.

And yes, Dumbledore's comment about time turners not going back that far is correct in this 'verse. It's also my headcanon to the original story, because I _hate_ "Cursed Child." It was a horrible story that made no sense at all and should _not_ be considered canon.

From a comment I sent someone, that I thought others would get a kick out of: I actually had to rewrite [chapter 38] because I let Molly loose on it and her original version involved Zoey stealing/using Hypatia's knowledge to do the following:

1\. Put wards on Luna's stuff that turned into a communicable magical illness that infected the entire school and forced the school into quarantine, which was the original excuse for her finding the Room of Lost Things. (Specifically, the magical illness was tied to an anchor stone, she couldn't figure out how to destroy it, and she didn't want to get caught and expelled, so she hid the anchor stone in the Room of Lost Things.)

2\. Used a ritual to pin Peeves in place, which led him to finally go apeshit on the school when he got out.

3\. Password locked Snape's office and the Slytherin dorm entrance, and ended up somehow managing to get Draco blamed for it.

Quite aside from that being Way Too Much, the way Zoey got Hypatia's powers was via Mother, which was WAY out of character for Mother to do. So that's the kind of thing you get when a seven year old who can write like an adult goes wild on a chapter, luckily I reigned her in.


	40. Guilt and Innocence

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 40"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Forty: Guilt and Innocence**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much. There's a lot of those in this one, but don't skim through or you'll miss things.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _Zoey_ _, #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and between hashtags/pound signs**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__

 _%_ _ _Mother AKA Avani Maznah, %__ and __"Hypatia/Megan."__

 **Note 4:** All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!

 **Note 5:** Sorry this took so long. Between my normal issues and working on some original fiction of my own, I've gotten behind on this one. Also I got stuck on some of the tarot stuff.

 ***FAYANORA***

The door of the office opened.

"Hello, Potter," said Moody. "Come in, then."

Adira walked inside. She had been inside Dumbledore's office once before; it was a very beautiful, circular room, lined with pictures of previous headmasters and headmistresses of Hogwarts, all of whom were fast asleep, their chests rising and falling gently.

Cornelius Fudge was standing beside Dumbledore's desk, wearing his usual pinstriped cloak and holding his lime-green bowler hat.

"Harry!" said Fudge jovially, moving forward. "How are you?"

"My name is Adira," she corrected.

"Right, sorry about that Adira, I remember reading about that now. Anyway, so how are you?"

"Fine," she lied.

"We were just talking about the night when Mr. Crouch turned up on the grounds," said Fudge. "It was you who found him, was it not?"

"Yes," said Adira. "Well technically it was Al, but I was there too." Then, feeling it was pointless to pretend that she hadn't overheard what they had been saying, she added, "I didn't see Madame Maxime anywhere, though, and she'd have a job hiding, wouldn't she?"

Dumbledore smiled at Adira behind Fudge's back, his eyes twinkling.

"Yes, well," said Fudge, looking embarrassed, "we're about to go for a short walk on the grounds, Adira, if you'll excuse us … perhaps if you just go back to your class —"

"I need to talk with Dumbledore. It's important."

"Wait here for me, Adira," he said. "Our examination of the grounds will not take long."

"Alright," she said, sitting down.

They trooped out in silence past her and closed the door. After a minute or so, Adira heard the clunks of Moody's wooden leg growing fainter in the corridor below. She looked around at all the interesting things in the room: Dumbledore's phoenix familiar, Fawkes (a silly name for a bird, now she thought of it); the gadgets the puffed and whirred and who knew what else; the portraits of the former headmasters pretending to sleep; the Sorting Hat...

And then she noticed a light coming from inside an improperly-closed cabinet. She hesitated, glanced at Fawkes, then got up, walked across the office, and pulled open the cabinet door.

A shallow stone basin lay there, with odd carvings around the edge: runes and symbols that she did not recognize, though she felt the stirrings of interest and recognition from Hypatia. The silvery light was coming from the basin's contents, which were like nothing they'd ever seen before. She could not tell whether the substance was liquid or gas. It was a bright, whitish silver, and it was moving ceaselessly; the surface of it became ruffled like water beneath wind, and then, like clouds, separated and swirled smoothly. It looked like light made liquid — or like wind made solid — Adira couldn't make up her mind.

She wanted to touch it, to find out what it felt like, but nearly four years' experience of the magical world told her that sticking her hand into a bowl full of some unknown substance was a very stupid thing to do. She therefore pulled her wand out of the inside of her robes, cast a nervous look around the office, looked back at the contents of the basin, and prodded them.

The surface of the silvery stuff inside the basin began to swirl very fast.

She bent closer, her head right inside the cabinet. The silvery substance had become transparent; it looked like glass. She looked down into it, expecting to see the stone bottom of the basin — and saw instead an enormous room below the surface of the mysterious substance, a room into which she seemed to be looking through a circular window in the ceiling.

 _(Well now this is fortuitous,)_ Hypatia said in their shared headspace.

 _I thought you weren't talking to us?_

 _(Eh. I'm over it. I'd still prefer to publicly have nothing to do with the lot of you, but I knew the secret would come out eventually. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's a pensieve. Which, before you ask, is a very expensive magical artifact that lets you hold memories to replay them as though you're there, watching from a third party perspective. It'd be too much work to explain all these runes, but basically there's runes dealing with time magic as well as mind magic. Creates some kind of quantum-temporal link between your memories and the actual events from the past. Nothing that could be used for time travel probably, but useful. You get to see what actually happened, even if you don't really know.)_

 _That's... kind of disturbing, actually. It would make a great espionage tool. You could use it to look at things, I dunno, a minute or two in the past, it'd be just as good as being right there!_

 _(No, it's more complicated than that. You can only view specific moments from the past, and you have to have been there, or have the memory from someone who was there. Even if you went out of visual range of the subject of the memory, you'd be pulled right out the moment the memory ended. Doesn't leave many options for espionage, really. Not the way you were thinking. Anyway, I'm curious what the old goat's hiding in here.)_

With no more warning than that, Hypatia took control of her arm and touched the surface of the memories with a single finger.

Dumbledore's office gave an almighty lurch — Adira was thrown forward and pitched headfirst into the substance inside the basin —

But her head did not hit the stone bottom. She was falling through something icy-cold and black; it was like being sucked into a dark whirlpool —

And suddenly, Adira found herself sitting on a bench at the end of the room inside the basin, a bench raised high above the others. She looked up at the high stone ceiling, expecting to see the circular window through which she had just been staring, but there was nothing there but dark, solid stone.

The room was dimly lit; she thought it might even be underground, for there were no windows, merely torches in brackets such as the ones that illuminated the walls of Hogwarts. Adira saw that rows and rows of witches and wizards were seated around every wall on what seemed to be benches rising in levels. An empty chair stood in the very center of the room. There was something about the chair that gave her an ominous feeling. Chains encircled the arms of it, as though its occupants were usually tied to it.

Where was this place? It surely wasn't Hogwarts; she had never seen a room like that here in the castle. Moreover, the crowd in the mysterious room at the bottom of the basin was comprised of adults, and Adira knew there were not nearly that many teachers at Hogwarts. They seemed, she thought, to be waiting for something; even though she could only see the tops of their hats, all of their faces seemed to be pointing in one direction, and none of them were talking to one another.

Not one of the witches and wizards in the room (and there were at least two hundred of them) was looking at her. Not one of them seemed to have noticed that a fourteen-year-old girl had just dropped from the ceiling into their midst, but then Hypatia had said this was someone's memory. Adira turned to the wizard next to her on the bench and uttered a gasp of surprise that reverberated around the silent room.

She was sitting right next to Albus Dumbledore.

 _(I was right. We're in the mad, gay old goat's memories,)_ Hypatia said in her head. _(Don't bother trying to interact, they can't see or hear or feel you, they're just memories.)_

 _Like in Riddle's diary?_

 _(What? Oh yeah, that's right. Huh. I'm impressed. But then again, that was a horcrux, and since there's supposedly pieces of his soul in those things, that might be different from this. But the similarity is suspicious, I'll grant you.)_

 _What do you mean 'supposedly'?_

 _(Well all this talk of a soul, really, it's absurd. The way people talk about it, it sounds more like the person's mind to me. It can't possibly be the soul, souls are supposed to be indestructible and immortal. Huh. I guess Riddle didn't believe in the soul either. If he did, he'd have no need to fear death, and no need to make horcruxes. Unless it was actually punishment for the things he did in his lifetime that he's afraid of.)_

She nodded absently, thinking to herself. So she was inside a memory, and this was not the present-day Dumbledore? Yet it couldn't be that long ago … the Dumbledore sitting next to her now was silver-haired, just like the present-day Dumbledore. But what was this place? What were all these wizards waiting for?

Adira looked around more carefully. The room, as she had suspected when observing it from above, was almost certainly underground — more of a dungeon than a room, she thought. There was a bleak and forbidding air about the place; there were no pictures on the walls, no decorations at all; just these serried rows of benches, rising in levels all around the room, all positioned so that they had a clear view of that chair with the chains on its arms.

Before she could reach any conclusions about the place in which they were, she heard footsteps. The door in the corner of the dungeon opened and three people entered — or at least one man, flanked by two dementors.

Her insides went cold, but none of the rest of her did. These dementors were just memories, and couldn't affect her. Excellent! Still, she remembered their power only too well. The watching crowd recoiled slightly as the dementors placed the man in the chained chair and glided back out of the room. The door swung shut behind them.

Adira looked down at the man now sitting in the chair and saw that it was Karkaroff.

Unlike Dumbledore, Karkaroff looked much younger; his hair and goatee were black. He was not dressed in sleek furs, but in thin and ragged robes. He was shaking. Even as Adira watched, the chains on the arms of the chair glowed suddenly gold and snaked their way up Karkaroff's arms, binding him there.

She watched as Mister Crouch accused him of being a Death Eater, and watched as he named names, so he could be released, which Moody wasn't at all happy about. None of the names sounded familiar to her until Severus Snape, which was not a surprise to her at this point. The only one that wasn't already dead, captured, or exonerated was one named Rookwood, who had worked for the Department of Mysteries, in the Ministry of Magic. An Unspeakable, then.

Adira was angry. Karkaroff had been a Death Eater, and they'd released him because he'd named a single other Death Eater they hadn't already been aware of? She sided with Moody on this one: hear his testimony and throw him back to the dementors.

After Crouch said he would review Karkaroff's case, the memory faded. The dungeon was dissolving as though it were made of smoke; everything was fading; she could see only her own body — all else was swirling darkness.

Then, suddenly, she was back in the dungeon. She was sitting in a different seat, still on the highest bench, but now to the left side of Mr. Crouch. The atmosphere seemed quite different: relaxed, even cheerful. The witches and wizards all around the walls were talking to one another, almost as though they were at some sort of sporting event. Adira saw a younger Rita Skeeter nearby. Dumbledore was wearing something different; a different day, a different memory. The memory of the trial of-

"BAGMAN!?" she exclaimed.

Sure enough, a younger, fitter, even more cheerful Ludo Bagman was on trial, though there were no dementors, and not even any chains, as there had been in Karkaroff's trial. Bagman's trial was a farce, in his favor. Mr. Crouch seemed to agree. Or rather... oh, she had it now; this was his sentencing, not his trial. There was no evidence or testimony given, the scene just showed the farce that was his sentencing, where he got declared innocent, his fans appearing to have secured his release. More reason to distrust the man.

As Adira watched the memory Moody on Dumbledore's other side, as well as a few other people she recognized, Hypatia said something in her mind.

 _(Huh. This pensieve thing would be very useful in learning enough stuff about someone to pretend to be them under Polyjuice Potion. Rip enough memories out of their head, spend a few days, weeks, or months viewing the memories, and it's all you'd need to fool their own mother.)_

Before she could respond, the memory changed again. The mood could not have been more different. Same room, but everyone in it was looking grim. Crouch looked so grim it was scary. There was total silence, broken only by the dry sobs of a frail, wispy-looking witch in the seat next to Mr. Crouch. She was clutching a handkerchief to her mouth with trembling hands.

"Bring them in," Crouch said, and his voice echoed through the silent dungeon.

The door in the corner opened yet again. Six dementors entered this time, flanking a group of four people. Adira saw the people in the crowd turn to look up at Mr. Crouch. A few of them whispered to one another.

The dementors placed each of the four people in the four chairs with chained arms that now stood on the dungeon floor. There was a thickset man who stared blankly up at Crouch; a thinner and more nervous-looking man, whose eyes were darting around the crowd; a woman with thick, shining dark hair and heavily hooded eyes, who was sitting in the chained chair as though it were a throne; and a boy in his late teens, who looked nothing short of petrified. He was shivering, his straw-colored hair all over his face, his freckled skin milk-white. The wispy little witch beside Crouch began to rock backward and forward in her seat, whimpering into her handkerchief.

Crouch stood up. He looked down upon the four in front of him, and there was pure hatred in his face.

What happened next was just... she didn't even know how to describe it. Crouch, voice and eyes colder than the far side of Pluto, sentenced the four people, including his own son (despite vehement, tearful protests of his innocence, begging his father to believe he hadn't done it), to Azkaban for torturing Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom.

The dementors were gliding back into the room. The boys' three companions rose quietly from their seats; the woman with the heavy-lidded eyes looked up at Crouch and called, "The Dark Lord will rise again, Crouch! Throw us into Azkaban; we will wait! He will rise again and will come for us, he will reward us beyond any of his other supporters! We alone were faithful! We alone tried to find him!"

But the boy was trying to fight off the dementors, even though Adira could see their cold, draining power starting to affect him. The crowd was jeering, some of them on their feet, as the woman swept out of the dungeon, and the boy continued to struggle.

"I'm your son!" Crouch's son screamed up at his father. "I'm your son!"

"You are no son of mine!" bellowed Mr. Crouch, his eyes bulging suddenly. "I have no son!"

The wispy witch beside him gave a great gasp and slumped in her seat. She had fainted. Crouch appeared not to have noticed.

"Take them away!" Crouch roared at the dementors, spit flying from his mouth. "Take them away, and may they rot there!"

"Father! Father, I wasn't involved! No! No! Father, please!"

"I think, Adira, it is time to return to my office," said a quiet voice in Adira's ear.

Adira started. She looked around. Then she looked on his other side.

There was an Albus Dumbledore sitting on her right, watching Crouch's son being dragged away by the dementors — and there was an Albus Dumbledore on her left, looking right at her.

"Come," said the Dumbledore on her left, and he put his hand under Adira's elbow. Adira felt herself rising into the air; the dungeon dissolved around her; for a moment, all was blackness, and then she felt as though she had done a slow-motion somersault, suddenly landing flat on her feet, in what seemed like the dazzling light of Dumbledore's sunlit office. The stone basin was shimmering in the cabinet in front of her, and Albus Dumbledore was standing beside her.

"I'm sorry, Professor," she said hurriedly. "We were looking at it, and Hypatia was explaining what it was, and then suddenly she touched it and there we were in your memories. I didn't know how to get out, and I doubt she would have told me if I'd asked."

"I quite understand," said Dumbledore. He lifted the basin, carried it over to his desk, placed it upon the polished top, and sat down in the chair behind it. He motioned for Adira to sit down opposite him.

Adira did so, staring at the stone basin. The contents had returned to their original, silvery-white state, swirling and rippling beneath her gaze.

"I should have known someone as well-read and gifted as Hypatia would recognize a pensieve when she saw it."

"Well, she actually read the runes, the ones she could see at least, and recognized it from those."

"Ah. Well I shall save the greater explanations for her, if she feels so inclined to explain it to you. How is her relationship with the rest of you, anyway?"

"Better. She says she's over the... well, I guess the anger at being found out. Says she knew it would happen eventually."

"Yes, no doubt she did. Of course, her anger being how it was suggests she was trying to convince herself otherwise."

They sat there in silence a few moments, Dumbledore staring into the pensieve, before Adira spoke again.

"How... how do you put memories in there, anyway?"

"Let me show you."

Dumbledore drew his wand out of the inside of his robes and placed the tip into his own silvery hair, near his temple. When he took the wand away, hair seemed to be clinging to it — but then Addy saw that it was in fact a glistening strand of the same strange silvery-white substance that filled the pensieve. Dumbledore added this fresh thought to the basin, and Addy, astonished, saw her own face swimming around the surface of the bowl. Dumbledore placed his long hands on either side of the pensieve and swirled it, rather as a gold prospector would pan for fragments of gold … and Addy saw her own face change smoothly into Snape's, who opened his mouth and spoke to the ceiling, his voice echoing slightly.

"It's coming back … Karkaroff's too … stronger and clearer than ever …"

"A connection I could have made without assistance," Dumbledore sighed, "but never mind." He peered over the top of his half-moon spectacles at Addy, who was gaping at Snape's face, which was continuing to swirl around the bowl. "I was using the pensieve when Mr. Fudge arrived for our meeting and put it away rather hastily. Undoubtedly I did not fasten the cabinet door properly. Naturally, it would have attracted your attention."

"I'm sorry," she mumbled.

Dumbledore shook his head. "Curiosity is not a sin," he said. "But we should exercise caution with our curiosity … yes, indeed … even with your esteemed Hypatia knowing what it was, you never know what horrible, scarring memories might be stored in one."

 _ **Yeah, like Dumbledore in the tub,**_ Al said. Addy winced.

Dumbledore looked curiously at her. "You don't want to know," she explained.

Nodding and frowning slightly, Dumbledore prodded the thoughts within the basin with the tip of his wand. Instantly, a figure rose out of it, a plump, scowling girl of about sixteen, who began to revolve slowly, with her feet still in the basin. She took no notice whatsoever of Adira or Professor Dumbledore. When she spoke, her voice echoed as Snape's had done, as though it were coming from the depths of the stone basin. "He put a hex on me, Professor Dumbledore, and I was only teasing him, sir. I only said I'd seen him kissing Florence behind the greenhouses last Thursday."

"But why, Bertha," said Dumbledore sadly, looking up at the now silently revolving girl, "why did you have to follow him in the first place?"

"Bertha?" Addy whispered, looking up at her. "Is that — was that Bertha Jorkins?"

"Yes," said Dumbledore, prodding the thoughts in the basin again; Bertha sank back into them, and they became silvery and opaque once more. "That was Bertha as I remember her at school."

The silvery light from the Pensieve illuminated Dumbledore's face, and it struck Addy suddenly how very old he was looking. She knew, of course, that Dumbledore was getting on in years, but somehow she never really thought of Dumbledore as an old man.

"So, Adira," said Dumbledore quietly. "Before you got lost in my thoughts, you wanted to tell me something."

"Oh, right. Well we were in Divination class, and of course the room was boiling hot. And, well, I fell asleep."

She hesitated here, wondering if a reprimand was coming, but Dumbledore merely said, "Quite understandable. Continue."

"Well, I had a dream," she said. "About Voldemort. He was torturing some woman with the cruciatus curse, but, well... she was enjoying it."

"Indeed?" Dumbledore said, looking concerned. "Please continue."

"Voldemort got a letter from an owl. He said something like, the woman's blunder had been repaired. He said someone was dead. Then he said, she wouldn't be fed to the snake — there was a snake beside his chair. He said — he implied he'd be feeding me to it, instead. Then he did the Cruciatus Curse on the woman, and my scar hurt," Addy said. "It woke me up, it hurt so badly."

Dumbledore merely looked at her.

"Er — that's all," she said.

"I see," said Dumbledore quietly. "I see. Now, has your scar hurt at any other time this year, excepting the time it woke you up over the summer?"

Realizing that Sirius had said he was going to tell Dumbledore about it, she answered, "No, just that time and this one."

"I see."

"So, um... given what Hypatia now knows about us being a horcrux..." she paused to swallow. It had only just now really hit her that if Hypatia couldn't solve the problem of removing the horcrux magic from something without destroying it, that she was going to die, along with everyone else in the collective.

"Yes?" he asked.

"Does this mean the vision is real? That I saw something through Voldemort's eyes because I'm one of his horcruxes, even if an accidental one?"

"You saw through his eyes? You did not see him from the outside?"

"No, I mean yes, I mean-" she sighed. "I mean I saw through his eyes. As though I were him."

Dumbledore nodded gravely. "Then I'm afraid you are correct, Adira. You are seeing through his eyes when he is feeling powerful emotions, due to you being a horcrux of his as well as his increased strength."

"So he _is_ getting stronger?"

"Yes. He has been for months. I am not sure why he has not risen again already. It worries me.

"Still, I am far from certain. But the years of Voldemort's ascent to power were marked with disappearances. Bertha Jorkins has vanished without a trace in the place where Voldemort was certainly known to be last. Mr. Crouch too has disappeared, within these very grounds. And there was a third disappearance, one which the Ministry, I regret to say, do not consider of any importance, for it concerns a Muggle. His name was Frank Bryce, he lived in the village where Voldemort's father grew up, and he has not been seen since last August. You see, I read the Muggle newspapers, unlike most of my Ministry friends."

Dumbledore looked very seriously at Adira.

"These disappearances seem to me to be linked. The Ministry disagrees — as you may have heard, while waiting outside my office."

She nodded. Silence fell between them again, Dumbledore extracting thoughts every now and then. Adira felt as though she ought to go, but her curiosity held her in her chair.

"Professor?" she said again.

"Yes, Adira?" said Dumbledore.

"Er … could I ask you about … that court thing I was in … in the pensieve?"

"You could," said Dumbledore heavily. "I attended it many times, but some trials come back to me more clearly than others … particularly now."

"You know — you know the trial you found me in? The one with Crouch's son? Well … were they talking about Neville's parents?"

Dumbledore gave Adira a very sharp look. "Has Neville never told you why he has been brought up by his grandmother?" he asked.

"No."

"Yes, they were talking about Neville's parents," said Dumbledore. "His father, Frank, was an Auror just like Professor Moody. He and his wife were tortured for information about Voldemort's whereabouts after he lost his powers, as you heard."

"So they're dead?" said Adira quietly.

"No," said Dumbledore, his voice full of a bitterness Adira had never heard there before. "They are insane. They are both in St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. I believe Neville visits them, with his grandmother, during the holidays. They do not recognize him."

Adira sat there, horror-struck, eyes filling with tears. She had never known … never, in four years, bothered to find out.

"The Longbottoms were very popular," said Dumbledore. "The attacks on them came after Voldemort's fall from power, just when everyone thought they were safe. Those attacks caused a wave of fury such as I have never known. The Ministry was under great pressure to catch those who had done it. Unfortunately, the Longbottoms' evidence was — given their condition — none too reliable."

"Then Mr. Crouch's son might not have been involved?" said Adira slowly.

Dumbledore shook his head.

"As to that, I have no idea."

"Er," she said, "Mr. Bagman …"

"… has never been accused of any Dark activity since," said Dumbledore calmly.

"Right," she said hastily, staring at the contents of the Pensieve again, which were swirling more slowly now that Dumbledore had stopped adding thoughts. "And … er …"

But the Pensieve seemed to be asking her question for her. Snape's face was swimming on the surface again. Dumbledore glanced down into it, and then up at Adira.

"No more has Professor Snape," he said.

"Because he was in love with my mum, and now he wants revenge against Voldemort on her behalf?"

"Indeed. But now I must ask you to leave. First, though, promise me you not speak about Neville's parents to anybody else. He has the right to let people know, when he is ready."

"I promise, sir. I wouldn't do that to him. I won't even tell him I know."

"Thank you," Dumbledore said, smiling.

She smiled back, and turned to go.

"And —"

Adira looked back. Dumbledore was standing over the Pensieve, his face lit from beneath by its silvery spots of light, looking older than ever. He stared at Adira for a moment, and then said, "Good luck with the third task."

Addy quickly went back to Griffindor tower. She, Ron, Hermione, and Sirius via the two-way mirror all ended up talking about what Addy had seen in the Pensieve, minus the stuff about Neville's parents. She also didn't tell Neville she knew about that. She'd had to put up with some of Sirius's warnings not to do dangerous stuff like wander off with Krum again, like she didn't already know his position on that. So mostly she ignored his well-intentioned hovering.

The following Monday morning, Al got an owl tapping at his window as he was getting ready. He opened the window and took the owl's message. The owl left right away.

Looking at the letter, he saw it was from Dumbledore.

 _Dear Alastair,_

 _I have written for a couple of reasons. First, this weekend at the Wizengamot I began proceedings to have the Dursleys charged with child neglect and possibly child abuse as well. If I can manage to do this properly, they will not be put in Azkaban. It is, after all, a prison for wizards. The standard excuse our nation gives for using dementors is that they rob a wizard of their powers, even though many other prisons around the world have just as good a track record of keeping prisoners within their walls without resorting to the cruel use of dark creatures such as they._

 _But I digress. The point is, a non-magical prison will suffice, and we do have such places for small offenses too minor for Azkaban. Technically, the prison they would go to if convicted is a magical holding cell but it would look and feel like an ordinary prison to Muggles. I did debate whether or not to just let the Muggle law system deal with them, even though their victim (you) is a magical human. But there is evidence we will be able to get trying them here in our world that would violate the Statute of Secrecy if we tried it in the Muggle world, that will be necessary given how many years it has been since you have been in their custody. Also there is your transformations to consider; given that they can be triggered by strong emotion, it would not do to have you transform in the middle of a Muggle court whilst testifying._

 _Speaking of testifying, you will be able to testify either with extracted memories (a harmless memory-copying spell), verbally under oath and/or veritaserum, or even both. Thus, you will not need to see the Dursleys in court unless you wish to. Let me know which you prefer as soon as you can._

 _But more on that later. Now on to the second thing. Ward-masters Fangslaughter and Benedict Snaggletooth from Gringotts wish to speak with a certain member of your collective (I think you know who I am referring to). They do not presently know anything about her beyond her being the sleepwalker. They would like to interview her about what she did to get past the wards on Sirius's flat, if she is amenable to it. If it helps, they did offer to pay you 1000 galleons in exchange for the information. Also, she is free to remain hiding as the sleepwalker by speaking with Adira's form, if she desires to help them. Please let me know her thoughts on the matter when you can._

 _Yours sincerely,_

 _Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore_

Using his wand to erase the paragraphs about Hypatia, then moving Dumbledore's signature up the page to disguise the fact it had been changed, he then put the letter in his trunk and went about his day.

 _ **Sure took them long enough,**_ Al thought at the others. _**Did you notice this didn't happen until the news came out? Dumbledore is probably trying to save face.**_

 _Yes, well we_ _ **did**_ _get rather distracted by everything going on. Voldemort, Riddle, Peter, Sirius, and now this Tournament BS,_ Addy responded.

 _(I'll do it),_ Hypatia said to them. _(I'll talk with Fangslaughter and Benedict Snaggletooth. Pretty sure the information isn't worth 1000 galleons, not really, so it's easy money. I know we don't need it, but hey, why not?)_

They ended up sending Dumbledore a note giving Hypatia's answer and saying they were still thinking about the other thing. He soon sent back a note saying the meeting would be next Wednesday in his office after dinner.

In the meantime, they had classes to go to, and practicing combat-useful spells for the Maze with Ron and Hermione.

They were halfway through when Ron got their attention to something.

"Come and look at this," said Ron, who was standing by the window. He was staring down onto the grounds. "What's Malfoy doing?"

Al and Hermione went to see. Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle were standing in the shadow of a tree below. Crabbe and Goyle seemed to be keeping a lookout; both were smirking. Malfoy was holding his hand up to his mouth and speaking into it.

"He looks like he's using a walkie-talkie," said Al curiously.

"He can't be," said Hermione, "I've told you, those sorts of things don't work around Hogwarts."

"So maybe it's some magical equivalent."

"I doubt that, Al," she said. "Hogwarts is warded against most forms of surveillance."

"Well maybe he has a two-way mirror?" Al suggested.

"Hmm... could be," she said.

"I don't see anything like reflections," Ron said, still looking out the window. "Then again, I guess I wouldn't if he's using it to talk to someone. But also, whatever he's talking to is very small. Too small to be a two-way mirror, I think."

"Come on, Al," Hermione added briskly, turning away from the window and moving back into the middle of the room, "let's try that Shield Charm again."

The _IDIOTS_! The complete and total idiots! They'd been up all night talking with Bushy-hair and Matchstick about what had happened to Mr. Crouch and not a one of them thought to check the Marauder's Map for him! Not that Hypatia had any room to complain, really; she hadn't thought of it either. And anyway, even if she had, it was likely that the culprit had already been gone from the grounds by the time they got back up to the Griffindor dorms.

Ah well, just a slight bump in the road. It's not like she really cared. It was very unlikely that whoever had entered them into the Triwizard Tournament was the same person who had abducted Mr. Crouch, if that's even what happened. Crouch might have snapped out of whatever was wrong with him, stunned them, and took off running. Hypatia barely even cared about the Triwizard Tournament either, anymore. The First Task had been scary, yes, but the Second Task had been boring to watch even from behind the eyes of one of the contestants, and the weird 3D maze building they were erecting on the Quidditch pitch was unlikely to be much more interesting than the Second Task. She was no longer convinced that whoever had put their names in the Goblet of Fire had been intending them any harm at all. Which didn't answer why they'd done it, but the unlikeliness of it being malevolent shot the mystery down to lowest priority in her mind. After all, not everything could be life or death.

She was much more interested in her work with Draco. And that had been a little odd lately too. They'd hardly been back in school after the Easter holidays for a week when Professor Snape had come into the Slytherin common room while she and Draco were there, looking completely unsurprised to see either of them there.

"Please, Miss Williams, do not panic," he had said. "Nor you, Mr. Malfoy. I know what you two are doing here, and I am not here to stop you. I am, in fact, here to help."

"Why, sir?" Draco asked.

"Because while I do not officially, publicly condone learning the Dark Arts, I do understand the appeal of it. I have Masteries in many Dark Arts as well as in Potions. I do not know you well, Miss Williams, but if Mr. Malfoy trusts you, I shall as well. Anyway, if you are going to learn Dark Arts, you might as well do it with me, so you do not do something unsafe and potentially deadly. Ritual magic can do some nasty things when done improperly, after all."

"How did you find out about what we're doing, sir?" Draco asked.

"I have my ways."

Hypatia wasn't sure, but she thought he glanced at her briefly as he spoke. Either way, she now knew that he knew because Dumbledore had told him. Most likely Dumbledore wanted Snape to try to convince her not to go down this road. After all, Snape had, and had ended up a Death Eater.

Draco seemed to realize he wasn't going to get anything more out of Snape, for he asked, "So you're going to help us?"

"Yes. By giving you both an unofficial apprenticeship in the Dark Arts."

Still suspicious, Draco said, "You're not expelling us for trying to learn Dark Arts? This stuff _is_ against the rules. And Dumbledore wouldn't approve."

"You are right, he would not. But what the Headmaster does not know will not hurt him."

That had been over two weeks ago. Snape's unofficial apprenticeship so far entailed some lecturing and note-taking, some assigned reading, and some training in proper safety techniques when working with ritual magic. She was most pleased when one of the assigned books was about runic casting, even if she was annoyed that Snape was restricting them to only a couple hours a night, since he still needed to sleep and didn't want them doing work together without him.

Runic casting, as it turned out, was dangerous too. Normal runic magic involved drawing or carving runes and pushing magic into them with intent. In runic casting, you had to cast intent and magic into the runes as you drew them in the air with your wand, which was a bit like building high-voltage electrical equipment that was powered up while you were building it, and therefore much more dangerous than ritual magic in some ways. Or at least, more immediately dangerous. Because of this, they would not actually be doing it any time soon, probably not until next school year. For now, Snape just wanted to make sure they knew how to be safe, and part of that was impressing upon them how potentially dangerous many Dark Arts were.

They were also learning a bit more about why some of these things were illegal. Apart from the danger of it, runic casting was illegal also because you could put a whole bunch of different effects together in one casting, and since it was runic magic and not a standard wand spell, no two people would ever be likely to cast the same runic-casting spell the same way. Often the same spell couldn't be cast the same way twice by the same person! Those differences from standard wand spells could make runic-casting spells a real challenge for Healers to counteract, because the arithmancy was often unique to every casting. The same wizard could hit three people with the same runic-casting spell and the arithmancy could be different for each instance. What was more, a lot of the time runic-casting spells could take so long for a Healer to work out a countermeasure for that the person could die before the countermeasure could be administered.

Wandless magic was legal, of course, but some of it had similar problems for Healers that runic-casting spells did. If someone could sense magic and thus feel out the shape of wand spells and shape their wandless magic into similar shapes, it wasn't so bad. But if someone was doing something like Chandra was doing, and experimenting with different shapes of magic, essentially creating entirely unique spells, that made the arithmancy hard to figure out. Not nearly as difficult to work out as runic-casting spells, but difficult.

Snape also reluctantly added, in all this information, that there really was no reason why any spell had to be used with any particular incantation. After all, a lot of people around the world had wands but were incapable of pronouncing Latin. Thus, wand magic was largely an association game where you associated a particular word with a particular spell or effect. The incantation used could alter the arithmancy of the spell slightly, but not enough to really make much of a difference.

From this information, Hypatia was able to extrapolate something useful enough to pass on to Chandra: that if he liked one of his wandless experimental spells enough, he could use runic-magic spell catchers to analyze the arithmancy of these spells, associate those spells with a sound, and make them into wand spells.

The only problem in that, of course, was Chandra's peculiar problem where he had to use emotions to cast wand spells. It was a vexing problem, one she'd been giving some thought to for a while, without being able to figure it out. So one night as Snape was escorting her back to Griffindor while she was under the invisibility cloak, she asked him about it.

When she was done explaining the problem and related thoughts, Snape nodded.

"Miss Williams," he whispered, "I have no idea why your friend is having that problem, but I shall give it some thought. I will let you know if I think of anything. In the mean time, we are passing your destination. Good night."

The Saturday after Mr. Crouch's appearance on the grounds, Hypatia was helping Chandra analyze some of his favorite experimental wandless spells so she could turn them into wand spells, when another project she'd been working on made a breakthrough.

One of the first nights back, Hypatia had read and memorized every page of the book written with the supposedly indecipherable code, had set up several constructs to working on the project, and then had let them get on with it while focusing herself on other things. And that Saturday while working with Chandra, the constructs announced to her that they were done. She was surprised it had taken so long, actually. She excused herself and withdrew Inside to look at the results.

Sure enough, they weren't lying or mistaken: they had arithmantically cracked the code, and now there were hundreds of pages of detailed notes and entries about the man's research trying to sacrifice other people's magic without hurting or killing them. Just skimming the results like that, she thought she spotted some of the flaws in his maths. But she'd look at it a bit more later; for now, she set twenty dicta-quills to copying out the decrypted results, each one copying out a specific one-twentieth of the book. This meant each quill only had to copy out fifty pages. At about ten pages an hour, it would only take them five hours to copy it all out.

Hypatia grinned at this. This coming Wednesday, she'd have something worth far more than 1000 galleons to sell to Gringott's. But then she paused, actually thinking about that, looking through the information now and then as she thought.

 _(No),_ she finally decided. This information was too dangerous in the wrong hands. Like the hands of a former Death Eater, or the kind of people Gringott's might sell it to. She decided to hide the book away when she had it transcribed – she'd have to, it was taking up too much memory in her head – and give Draco back the original, claiming she couldn't crack it. She'd say she didn't have access to a computer powerful enough to do it, which wasn't technically a lie. He didn't know she could do stuff like this in her head; he had no inkling just how good she was at maths.

Yes, she'd keep this to herself. And if anyone else cracked it, she'd have the information too, maybe she could come up with a counter just in case.

Adira went up to Dumbledore's office on Wednesday completely ignorant of any of this, and soon she was sitting at a familiar table and room, the very ones she'd met with the man from Quality Quidditch Supplies at during her second year. She waited a few minutes, bored, for Fangslaughter and his partner to arrive.

The door opened. "Your guests are here now," Dumbledore said.

She turned her head to the side at his voice and all three of them came in and sat down. Hypatia took over control of the body but didn't change it, and glared at Dumbledore.

"I believe this does not involve you, Headmaster," she said.

He looked into her eyes. She let him see the same thing she'd shown him when he was testing her occlumency.

"I apologize. I was just interested, too."

"She's got a point," Fangslaughter said. "This is between her and us. It's a business transaction. You need to leave."

Dumbledore sighed, but got up and left the room.

She turned to Fangslaughter, who looked at her with suspicion.

"Did you get the owl I sent Sunday night?"

"Yes, we did. Did you not get ours, which said we agree that you could put it in book form?"

"I did. I just wanted to make sure someone else wasn't pretending to be you."

"Excellent precaution."

"So do you have the money for the full purchase?"

The goblin chuckled at her. "Straight to the point, I like your style. To answer your question, I have access to the money, which I will transfer to your account when I see the merchandise."

From the pouch around her neck she pulled out a hand-bound book, quite small, and slid it over.

"This is my complete, detailed report on how I got past the wards in Sirius Black's flat, including the stupid mistakes I made to get caught."

As the goblin and his human partner skimmed through the book, Fangslaughter looked annoyed.

"Parts of this book are blacked out."

"That's a spell of my own design. I made sure to keep enough visible to get your interest, but I can't have you memorizing anything before the money is in my account. Once it is, I'll lift the spell."

"You are a shrewd human indeed. Alright, 1000 galleons for the book, as promised. It seems more the adequately detailed, after all."

"Agreed."

"One thousand galleons it is," he said, drawing up a contract and then starting a magical check made out to Adira Potter.

Taking the contract from him, she read it. It was simple enough. If she signed it, she'd be agreeing that the book was what they said it was, as well as agreeing to lift the censorship spell from it upon completion of the sale, and if there was a problem with it, that she could be fined.

"Looks good," she said, and signed the contract.

Fangslaughter took it back and signed on behalf of Gringott's. The contract glowed, sealing the deal.

"Do you want any in cash?"

"I'll take a couple hundred in galleons, the rest can go straight to my account."

He nodded, soon passing her a sack full of galleons. She counted it as he wrote out the rest of the check he'd started and handed it to her. It was made out correctly, as far as she could tell, and for the right amount. He had given her the right amount of galleons, too.

"Sign the back of the check, Miss Potter, and the money will transfer to your account."

She moved aside to let Adira sign for her just in case the magic could tell the difference between her and Addy. As soon as the back of the check was signed, the check disappeared. A few minutes later, a scroll magically appeared in the same spot. She opened it and read it; it was basically a receipt saying the money had been transferred to her account, signed by a Gringott's employee and stamped with the official Gringott's seal.

Hypatia got out her wand and lifted the censorship spells from the book. They looked through the book again to verify it was done, and smiled. Hypatia smiled back, privately hoping they wouldn't be too angry when they'd read enough of the book to reveal that she'd only managed to do it because her brain was basically a human computer, and that even the likes of Dumbledore would probably be unable to do what she'd done without using a Muggle computer.

"It's been a pleasure doing business with you, Fangslaughter." She got up, bowed while holding her hands out to her sides to show they had no weapons in them, and to everyone's surprise, she said something in the harsh, guttural language of Gobbledygook.

Once Fangslaughter recovered from the shock, he did the same bow back at her, saying something slightly different in Gobbledygook. Then the two of them left.

 _ **You know Gobbledygook?**_ Alastair said incredulously.

 _(Only a little bit. The Goblin Nation's official greetings, goodbyes, a few similar things, and their responses.)_

 _ **What happens when he finds out you're probably the only one who could do what you did to the wards?**_

 _(Oh, probably send me a Howler, if Goblins even do that. But if he tries to fine me, we can fight it easily and cheaply, if we want to; I never at any point said anything to indicate the information was_ _ **worth**_ _a thousand galleons; he was the one who made that offer.)_

 _ **Clever, that.**_

As it turned out the next day, Goblins do indeed send Howlers sometimes. He did at least have the decency to restrict the content of it to, "MISS POTTER! I HAVE ONLY THIS TO SAY: **AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"**

Using Iliana's face, Hypatia grinned at his upset.

Their nerves mounted as June the tenth drew closer, but they were not as bad as those they'd felt before the first and second tasks. For one thing, they were confident that, this time, they'd done everything in their power to prepare for the task. For another, this was the final hurdle, and however well or badly they did, the tournament would at last be over, which would be an enormous relief.

Still, despite these growing nerves, Iliana managed to remember to do a few things she needed to do. She gave the Weasley twins 50 galleons, telling them a nice lie about having gotten the money from Bagman under threat of being hexed, which they accepted. Also, she cornered Neville and convinced him to come with her and Luna on the Hogsmeade visit June 5th to get him a new wand at the Hogsmeade branch of Ollivander's. He had put up a fuss, but she'd insisted rather vehemently, as well as made him realize that since it would technically be his first bought wand, it would be covered by the Ministry subsidy and thus only cost her seven galleons. She said he could pay her back if he wanted, too, which had sealed the deal.

So on Saturday the fifth, Iliana, Luna, and Neville rode down to Hogsmeade together. The man who worked at the Hogsmeade branch of Ollivander's looked like he was related to Mr. Ollivander, but was much easier to be around than Garrick Ollivander himself.

After Neville got his wand – thirteen inches, cherry wood with unicorn horn, Iliana and Luna went to a divination store so Al could buy some books on the subject as well as a tarot deck.

The rest of the visit that day was nice. Iliana and Luna ended up walking all around the village looking at all the different shops, Iliana got Luna a nice flower for her hair, they had lunch at a little cafe called Brews and Stews, then they found out the village had a little theater company where they showed plays when the Hogwarts students got to visit, so they took in a show there. The play was a version of some wizarding fairy tale Iliana wasn't familiar with. When it was over, they went to the bookstore and Iliana got a copy of Beedle the Bard's collection of wizarding fairy tales. They capped off the day with a trip to The Three Broomsticks.

That evening, they switched to Al and he read a book he'd gotten about tarot card divination. This reading included information about a three-card spread where one card represented the past, another the present, and the third represented the future. On a lark, he 'transferred his energy' to the deck as instructed, then shuffled his deck several times with a simple charm that the book said was great at randomizing things. Then he drew three cards, face down, and set the deck down before uncovering the cards, with the question he wanted answered in his mind: 'What is the situation with Voldemort?'

He turned over the first card, concerning the past. It was upside down, but it was the Empress. He looked up the reversed Empress in the book; it said, 'Empress reversed indicates neglect and a lack of attention where there should be nurturing. She can represent a mother who gives little affection and hardly any protection to her child. The child can also symbolize a project, a relationship, an enterprise, the home and a business that need attention but are instead being left unattended.'

Al blinked at this, confused by it. Something to think about later. For now, he turned over the next card – the one for the present, keeping the question in his mind. It was Death, but upside down again. That meant that something that should have come to a blessed end was still persisting. Well that was a pretty accurate description of Voldemort's current situation alright.

So he turned over the third card, the one for the future. It was the Tower. Given the possible meaning for that, and the context of the question, he figured it meant either disaster and/or 'sudden change that is caused by disruption and revelations that rock the foundation of the person, household, organization or even country, depending on the nature of the question.'

"Yeah, tell me the obvious why don't you," he sniped at the cards. The card, he figured, was basically saying Voldemort would come back some day, which would indeed be a disaster.

After some thought, he decided to do some one-card draws to try to explain the first answer. Reshuffling the deck, he thought of the question, 'Who failed to nurture Voldemort in his past, which led to this situation?'

He got the Empress, upright this time. So Voldemort's mom was the one who didn't nurture him? Well the guy _was_ an orphan. Or _was_ he? If she was the one who failed him, maybe the card was saying she gave him up? He wondered if he could get an answer to that. The book said that yes/no questions were generally a bad idea leading only to confusion, but you could get around that by rewording the question. So he asked his deck 'How do you feel about the conclusion that Voldemort's mother abandoned him?'

The card he drew was the King of Swords. With its association with having clarity of thought, Al took this as a 'yes' answer.

He tried again, asking 'Did anyone else fail Voldemort in his past?' This time, he got the Hierophant reversed. Its meaning confused him at first, given the context: 'Hierophant reversed denotes prudence, silliness and hypocrisy. There are rules but no knowledge of why these rules are of importance. The ego is without guidance. There is an inflexibility in the system and in the people of the system. It can be an institution who control information and the leaders make themselves rich while the poor remain poor.'

"What, so he was failed by the system? Which system, though: the Muggle one or the magical one?"

Asking that question of the deck now, he got the Magician, which in context didn't require any more information as far as Al was concerned. Obviously it meant the magical system had failed him.

Al felt a strange urge to ask another question, 'Did anyone at Hogwarts fail Voldemort in his past?' To that one, he got the Emperor. A question about Hogwarts, and he'd gotten the card concerning the leader of an organization? That had to be Dumbledore. Dumbledore had failed young Tom Riddle somehow.

But while all that was interesting if true, it wasn't really important. What was more important was getting more information about the present and future. The problem was, he didn't think the Tarot would be very efficient at helping him find horcruxes. And really, he knew how to end Voldemort's hold on this earth already. So he'd have to ask something else. He'd ask clarification on the future. The three-card draw had said, basically, that there was a disaster in the future, involving Voldemort.

He decided on a slightly different kind of three-card draw, as outlined in the book. This time, he would be asking questions where the three cards would represent 'what will help you/what will hinder you/what is your unrealized potential.' He reshuffled and did the new draw, asking for advice on the quest to end Voldemort.

The first card he uncovered, for 'what will help you,' was...

" _The_ _ **Tower**_ **?** What the _hell?_ Not even reversed? A disaster or upheaval is going to _help_ me? Weird."

Al sighed and moved on to the next card, for 'what will hinder you.'

"Hmm... the Hermit, reversed. The book says... 'Hermit reversed indicates isolation and paranoia. There is no insight, rather there is a twisted and vicious side to the person. This also denotes someone who is very lonely and is 'loosing' their grip on reality due to the amount of time they spend by themselves.' So I shouldn't isolate myself or fall into paranoia, and make sure I'm spending enough time with others? Okay, so noted. Now on to 'what is my unrealized potential.'"

He turned over the card to reveal it was the King of Wands. The meaning of this card was long and involved, but basically meant his unrealized potential was leadership, problem solving, helping others get past their fear, doing what you think is right, and taking on challenges. There was also some warning against becoming arrogant or aggressive in the pursuit of your goals, against getting distracted by bigger and better things, and against ignoring other people. He wrote down everything he'd come up with so far, Hypatia's better memory helping him with a resigned sigh in its tone when he forgot stuff.

Of course, there was the slight issue of whether the deck was answering questions just for him, or for the whole collective, and whether or not the difference mattered, because either way, the last two cards were good advice. He was pretty sure the cards were answering for him, though, given the details of the King of Wands.

It was that Tower that confused him still. How was a disaster supposed to help him? And what questions could he ask to get clarification? He'd have to think on that for a few days and come back to it later.

Time for one final draw, on another subject. With the question 'What do I do concerning the Third Task' in his mind, he drew his cards.

For 'what will help you,' he got another strange card, the ten of swords. That card is about betrayal and loss, and accepting change. He sighed in annoyance, and went on. The second card, for 'what will hinder you,' he got the reversed three of pentacles, indicating a lack of teamwork could be a problem. Kind of obvious, so he went on. For 'what is my unrealized potential,' this time he got the nine of wands. In context, he supposed that meant he had an unrealized potential for persisting in the face of challenges and fighting against the odds. Possibly even of winning no matter how bad things got before the end.

After writing that all down, Alastair put the cards away, tired. He wasn't sure how good he was at this, how accurate his readings were, or if it was working at all. Some of the answers made sense, but he had no way to verify them, that he knew of. Still, some of the cards had given good advice, so he decided to try to verify his findings somehow. But for now, rest.

 **Endnote:** Stopping short because it's been too long since the last chapter.


	41. Into The Breech

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 40"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Forty-one: Into The Breech**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much. There's a lot of those in this one, but don't skim through or you'll miss things.

 _ **Note 3:**_ _I have different styles for the internal speech of_ _ **Alastair**_ _, Adira,_ _Zoey_ _, #_ ** _ **Iliana (bold, italic, underlined, and between hashtags/pound signs**_** _ _ **.**__ _ _# ,__ _ _{Tier}, ~Chandra,~__

 _%_ _ _Mother AKA Avani Maznah, %__ _and_ _ _"Hypatia/Megan."__

 _ **Note 4:**_ _All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!_

 _ **Note 5:**_ _Sorry this took so long. Between my normal issues and working on some original fiction of my own, I've gotten behind on this one._

 _ **Note 6:**_ _Trigger warning: There's a little bit of gore in this chapter, in the graveyard scene, that isn't there in canon._

 _Note 7: FF keeps messing up the formatting on this thing. I don't have the energy to try fixing it again. Sorry if that makes it hard to read._ _ _If it's too confusing to read here, the BigCloset version is clean: bigclosetr . us / topshelf / fiction / 71085 / many-faces-harry-potter-41__

 _ _ ***FAYANORA***__

 _In the days leading up to the third task, Alastair kept his tarot deck with them at all times, using it now and then to test its accuracy by asking questions that could be verified. He found he was getting accurate answers every time, something that surprised him. Finally, a form of divination that_ _ _worked,__ _that was_ _ _worth__ _something!_

 _Another useful new thing was Chandra and Hypatia had turned some of Chandra's wandless experiments into wanded spells with incantations. Well, incantations after a fashion; Chandra had chosen to associate the spells with musical notes, something he had apparently done with some previously existing spells as well. What was more, apparently the wand movements weren't actually necessary either, so he didn't need to bother with those. The difference these things made for him for the speed of his casting was incredible. In a matter of weeks, he'd gone from the slowest caster of all of them to the fastest, able to toss a dozen spells off in seconds just by aiming his wand and singing a few bars of song._

 _On the morning of the third task, however, something bad happened; Rita Skeeter, not happy with exposing their history with the Dursleys to the public, had written another article about them, which suggested they were more insane than being a multiple would even account for. The article was about how "disturbed and dangerous" they were, how they were now hallucinating in classes, claiming their scar hurt, and revealing also their Parseltongue status._

 _Adira sighed. "Well, that happened," she said. "Whatever. People will think what they'll think. I'm officially done giving a crap."_

 _"How did she know your scar hurt in Divination?" Ron asked. "There's no way she was there, there's no way she could've heard —"_

 _"The window was open," said Addy. "I opened it to breathe."_

 _"You were at the top of North Tower!" Hermione said. "Your voice couldn't have carried all the way down to the grounds!"_

 _"Well, you're the one who's supposed to be researching magical methods of bugging!" said Addy. "You tell me how she did it!"_

 _"I've been trying!" said Hermione. "But I … but …"_

 _An odd, dreamy expression suddenly came over Hermione's face. She slowly raised a hand and ran her fingers through her hair._

 _"Are you all right?" said Ron, frowning at her._

 _"Yes," said Hermione breathlessly. She ran her fingers through her hair again, and then held her hand up to her mouth, as though speaking into an invisible walkie-talkie. Addy and Ron stared at each other._

 _"I've had an idea," Hermione said, gazing into space. "I think I know … because then no one would be able to see … even Moody … and she'd have been able to get onto the window ledge … but she's not allowed … she's definitely not allowed … I think we've got her! Just give me two seconds in the library — just to make sure!"_

 _With that, Hermione seized her school bag and dashed out of the Great Hall._

 _"Oi!" Ron called after her. "We've got our History of Magic exam in ten minutes! Blimey," he said, turning back to Addy, "she must really hate that Skeeter woman to risk missing the start of an exam. What're you going to do in Lupin's class — read again?"_

 _Exempt from the end-of-term tests as a Triwizard champion, Addy had been sitting in the back of every exam class so far, even Lupin's history class, looking up fresh hexes for the third task._

 _"Yes, I guess I-"_

 _ _(HOLY SHIT!)__ _came a shout in their head._

 _ _Jeez Louise, Hypatia, could you shout any louder? What's up?__

 _ _(I think I know what Hermione figured out! Skeeter is an animagus! She becomes a beetle!)__

 _ _Really?__

 _ _(Yes, remember there was a beetle in Luna's hair after the Second Task? And that beetle that nearly got eaten by your snake during your first date with Luna?)__

 _ _Yes! And it would explain why we didn't see her at the ice cream shop! She could tail us by hitching a ride on our clothes!__

 _ _(And Draco was talking to her in his hand! He wouldn't mind she was doing it illegally.)__

 _Adira was about to share all this with Ron when Professor McGonagall came walking alongside the Gryffindor table toward her._

"Potter, the champions are congregating in the chamber off the Hall after breakfast," she said.

"But the task's not till tonight!" said Addy, accidentally spilling scrambled eggs down her front, afraid she had mistaken the time.

 _"I'm aware of that, Potter," she said. "The champions' families are invited to watch the final task, you know. This is simply a chance for you to greet them."_

 _"Wait, when you say our families..."_

 _"I mean just Sirius Black, Miss Potter, not to worry."_

 _"Oh good."_

 _"Adira, I'd better hurry," Ron said. "I'm going to be late for Lupin's class. See you later."_

 _"You too, Ron!"_

 _Addy quickly finished her breakfast and followed Fleur Delacour and Cedric Diggory as they crossed to the side chamber and entered with them, Krum close behind._

 _Cedric and his parents were just inside the door. Viktor Krum was over in a corner, conversing with his dark-haired mother and father in rapid Bulgarian. He had inherited his father's hooked nose. On the other side of the room, Fleur was jabbering away in French to her mother. Fleur's little sister, Gabrielle, was holding her mother's hand. She waved at Adira, who waved back, grinning. Then she saw Sirius, and ran over to them to hug him._

 _"How are you, pup?" Sirius asked._

 _"A little nervous, but fine."_

 _"I read your most recent letter to me," Sirius said. "So Al has mastered the tarot deck, then?"_

 _"Well he hasn't tried any of the more complex spreads yet, just one card and three-card spreads, but so far so good."_

 _"Excellent! And Chandra's casting with music?" Sirius asked._

 _"Yeah, it's pretty cool," Adira said. "Want me to see if I can get him to show you?"_

 _"We'd better go onto the grounds for that," Sirius said._

 _"Yeah, okay," said Addy, and they made their way back toward the door into the Great Hall. As they passed Amos Diggory, he looked around at them._

 _"There you are, are you?" he said, looking Addy up and down. "Bet you're not feeling quite as full of yourself now Cedric's caught you up on points, are you?"_

 _"What?" said Addy._

 _"Ignore him," said Cedric in a low voice to her, frowning after his father. "He's been angry ever since Rita Skeeter's article about the Triwizard Tournament — you know, when she made out you were the only Hogwarts champion."_

 _"Didn't bother to correct her, though, did she?" said Amos Diggory, loudly enough for Addy to hear as she started to walk out of the door with Mrs. Weasley and Bill. "Still … you'll show her, Ced. Beaten her once before, haven't you?"_

 _"Rita Skeeter goes out of her way to cause trouble, Amos!" Sirius said angrily. "I would have thought you'd know that, working at the Ministry!"_

 _Mr. Diggory looked as though he was going to say something angry, but his wife laid a hand on his arm, and he merely shrugged and turned away._

 _"Anyway, Mr. Diggory," Adira said, "I tried multiple times telling her off. Al even lit her parchment on fire. It didn't do any good, except that over the past few months we've made our displeasure with her even more obvious, or hadn't you read her later article where she said I attacked her? That much was at least mostly true; she insulted a friend of mine, and Chandra magically pinned her to the ceiling in retribution."_

 _He turned back around, looking a little mollified, and a little embarrassed._

 _"Rita Skeeter is vile garbage and we can't stand her. I can't believe you'd take any of her tripe seriously! You've been putting up with her lies far longer than I have, you should have figured out by now she's a lying waste of space who puts just enough truth in her lies to make them believable."_

 _Mr. Diggory looked sheepish all of a sudden._

 _"Sorry, Adira," he said, more sheepish than ever before._

 _She paused a few seconds before saying, "Apology accepted." They shook hands, and Addy turned around toward Sirius. "Come on, I want to show off Chandra's new technique."_

 _Adira had a very enjoyable morning walking over the sunny grounds with Sirius, showing him the Beauxbatons carriage and the Durmstrang ship, and showing off Chandra's technique. They did that by having an actual dual with Sirius, who had been practicing to get back on form, and they soundly beat Sirius by bombarding him with more spells than he could duck or shield against, though it had taken several minutes; several minutes where Adira looked like she was a dancing and singing orchestra conductor, tossing out an impressive number of spells along the way. Afterward, it took the two of them 10 minutes with their wands to clean up the mess and restore the grounds they'd damaged during the duel._

 _After lunch in the Great Hall, the two of them whiled away the afternoon with a long walk around the castle, and then returned again to the Great Hall for the evening feast. Ludo Bagman and Cornelius Fudge had joined the staff table now. Bagman looked quite cheerful, but Cornelius Fudge, who was sitting next to Madame Maxime, looked stern and was not talking. Madame Maxime was concentrating on her plate, and Adira thought her eyes looked red. Hagrid kept glancing along the table at her._

 _There were more courses than usual, but Adira, who was starting to feel really nervous now, didn't eat much._ Instead, she was letting Al do some more tarot spreads of their situation. Some of the results they were getting were bizarre, and starting to add up to a direction that was getting disturbing. They didn't want to believe it, but when they pieced it together, they put the cards away and got up.

"Sirius, Remus, I have to check something, I'll be right back," she said, running off.

"Where are you going? The Third Task starts in 20 minutes!"

"I'll be there, going to my dorm really quick!" she called back.

 _Please don't let it be true, please don't let it be true_ , she kept thinking as she ran to her room and pulled out the Marauder's Map. Scanning it quickly, she saw Alastor Moody on the Map, where he always appeared to be on it, in his office. Most everyone else was in the Great Hall. She looked over by the library and saw... but he was dead! Wasn't he? But no, he could have run away and come back later. Why else would the name Barty Crouch be on the Map?

There was only one way to find out for sure. She put the Map away and hurried off under her invisibility cloak to check Moody's office. When she got there, she couldn't unlock the door. But Hypatia, sensing the importance of this, gave her some other spells to try, and finally she got into the office and began looking around for the thing she'd figured out would be important if she was right.

Soon enough, she found it. Getting it open was a little harder because it had seven locks, but with Hypatia's help, they soon had the trunk open to the right lock and looked down into it at Alastor Moody – the _real_ Alastor Moody. His hair had plainly been cut quite a lot, without any concern for aesthetics. Which suggested the Polyjuice Potion.

She suddenly felt a wand at her back.

"So you figured it out, did you?" said the familiar voice of the fake Moody.

"Y-yes."

"I worried you might, ever since I started seeing you with those tarot cards. Especially when I noticed your readings were incredibly accurate. Knew it was a matter of time. I was hoping you'd go down to the Third Task before you figured it out, though."

"So you're going to kill us now? Now that we've found you out?"

He chuckled. "Oh no, Miss Potter. You're going to go to the Third Task. You will tell nobody what you've found out. You will offer no hint or clue that anything is amiss, that you're anything more than nervous for the Third Task for entirely normal reasons. You will not make eye contact with Snape or Dumbledore, either, or let them make eye contact with you. You will win the Tournament, touch the Triwizard Cup, which I have made into a Portkey. In so doing, you will go join my master to become an ingredient he needs for his return to power."

"Why the Hell should I do any of that?"

"Because despite hoping I was wrong, I nonetheless anticipated your discovery of the truth. I don't know how you got past the locking spells I had on the door, but I prepared for this possibility all the same, given your track record. I think you'll find your little blond girlfriend, the Lovegood freak, will be missing from the crowd tonight. From what I know of her, I doubt anyone will notice her absence."

"What have you done with Luna?!"

"She is alive and well. I stunned her from behind, and she's sleeping safely somewhere else. She'll be released safely when you touch the Triwizard Cup. There's no reason to keep her longer than that; she is no threat to my master, and you will not live to see the next sunrise, so by then she will no longer be useful as leverage. I give you my word of her safety, even though I doubt you'll believe me. But that's only if you cooperate. If you don't, even your tarot cards won't help you find her before she dies."

They thought very fast, about whether they could find Luna before this unknown man could hurt her. But they had no idea where she was, what kind of danger she was in, or how this man was planning to hurt her if they didn't cooperate.

 _(This man is an idiot. Why doesn't he just modify our memory?)_

 _ **Maybe he can't think of a cover story for why we rushed off. Shit, we should think of one, so Luna doesn't get hurt!**_

 _How about 'invisibility cloak'? It could be useful in the Third Task, and at no time was it forbidden. Also, we_ _ **do**_ _have the cloak._

The wand at her back poked her.

"Fine, okay, I agree," she said. "But if you hurt Luna, I will make you beg for the mercy of death."

"That confident you'll survive, Potter? Sorry, but even with that dancing light show you put on earlier, my master will still kill you without a problem. Your spells are impressive looking, but they are weak and pathetic."

"Are you going to keep yammering and make me late to the Task, or what?"

The wand lifted from her.

"Go then, Potter. But remember, one sign of trying to warn anyone, and I will kill her."

"I swear on my magic I will go touch the Triwizard Cup and face Voldemort. Happy now?"

"Yes, quite. Then if you do something stupid, you lose both your little lover _and_ your magic. Go now, hurry."

She turned around. The fake Moody had a wand aimed at her still, but he had moved out of her way. She took off running, no longer caring about Filch catching her.

"There you are!" Sirius said as Adira ran up to the Quidditch pitch. "You're very nearly late. Where were you?"

"Had to get my invisibility cloak. Might be useful."

"Well hurry along before they get too impatient. Be safe, pup."

"Yes, Sirius," she said. It wasn't even a lie; the fake Moody had only bound her to facing Voldemort, the terms of the binding said nothing about immediately fleeing the moment she saw him or surviving somehow. At least, that's how she _hoped_ it worked.

 _"Feeling all right, uh... Adira?" Bagman asked as they went down the stone steps onto the grounds. "Confident?"_

 _"Yes yes, let's just get on with this, okay?"_

 _Bagman looked sympathetic, and turned away from her._

 _They walked onto the Quidditch field, which was now completely unrecognizable. A very large cube-shaped building was in the center, the inside of the structure visible, and a number of other screens up repeating the visuals for the sides of the cube the people in the stands couldn't otherwise see from where they were. There seemed to be four floors on the thing. The stands were full; the air was full of excited voices and the rumbling of feet as the hundreds of students filed into their seats. Adira scanned the stands for Luna, and saw no sign of her, which confirmed her fears._

The sky was a deep, clear blue now, and the first stars were starting to appear. Hagrid, Professor Moody, Professor McGonagall, and Professor Flitwick came walking into the stadium and approached Bagman and the champions. They were wearing large, red, luminous stars on their hats, all except Hagrid, who had his on the back of his moleskin vest.

"We are going to be patrolling the outside of the maze," said Professor McGonagall to the champions. "If you get into difficulty, and wish to be rescued, send red sparks into the air, and one of us will come and get you, do you understand?"

The champions nodded, but Adira wondered how that would work. Did the teachers have a map of the maze, or some kind of shortcuts? Oh well, there wasn't time to ask, and she didn't trust herself not to spill the beans if she tried.

Bagman explained a bit more, about how the center of the maze was on the second floor, but there were places where they'd have to go to the third or even fourth floor to work their way there. When he was done, he asked if they understood. They all nodded.

"Off you go, then!" said Bagman brightly to the four patrollers.

"Good luck, Addy," Hagrid whispered, and the four of them walked away in different directions, to station themselves around the maze. Bagman now pointed his wand at his throat, muttered, " _Sonorus,_ " and his magically magnified voice echoed into the stands.

 _"Ladies and gentlemen, the third and final task of the Triwizard Tournament is about to begin! Let me remind you how the points currently stand! In first place, Viktor Krum of Durmstrang Institute with 90 points! Tied in second place with 78 points each are Adira Potter and Cedric Diggory, both of Hogwarts School! And in last place, Fleur Delacour of Beauxbatons Academy!"_

 _Adira turned and saw the fake Moody. Employing her occlumency, she hid her feelings about him well. As she turned back, she saw Sirius and Remus cheering for her. She turned away, her stomach feeling horrible, and she was suddenly very sad, thinking she might be dead before tomorrow, that this might be the last time they saw her, the last time she saw them._

 _"So on my whistle, Mr. Krum!" said Bagman. "Three, two, one-"_

 _He gave a short blast on his whistle, and Krum went forward into the weird maze building. After a minute or two's head start – she wasn't sure, time was being weird again – she heard the second whistle, and she and Cedric hurried forward into the maze._

 _The inside of the building looked like a normal corridor, except that there weren't any doors, just other corridors intersecting with each other. Very little sound from outside made its way inside, which made sense. She felt almost as though she were underwater again. She pulled out her wand, muttered, "_ _ _Lumos,__ _" and heard Cedric do the same just behind her._

 _After about fifty yards, they reached a fork. They looked at each other._

 _"See you," she said, taking the left one. Cedric took the right._

 _Adira didn't go far, though. With some help from Hypatia, she cast a few spells on the corridor to impede Fleur's progress. She couldn't yet stop Krum from winning instead of her, nor Cedric, but if she could save Fleur, then she'd have done something good. She just hoped Fleur wouldn't be able to break through before Adira could touch the accursed Triwizard Cup._

 _With that done, Adira hurried down the left fork again. Her chosen path seemed completely deserted. She turned right, and hurried on, holding her wand high over her head, trying to see as far ahead as possible. Still, there was nothing in sight._

 _Bagman's whistle blew in the distance for the third time. All of the champions were now inside. Addy hoped Fleur would later figure out that Addy had saved her life. And that it would work._

 _She kept looking behind herself. The old feeling that she was being watched was upon her, which probably meant the fake Moody was watching her. The maze was growing darker with every passing minute as the sky overhead deepened to navy. She reached a second fork._

" _Point Me,_ " she whispered to her wand, holding it flat in her palm.

 _The wand spun around once and pointed toward her right, into solid wall. That way was north, and she knew that she needed to go northwest and up a couple floors or more for the center of the maze. The best she could do was to take the left fork and go right again as soon as possible._

 _The path ahead was empty too, and when Addy reached a right turn and took it, she again found her way unblocked. Down that corridor she found a staircase, and she climbed it, finding another unimpeded path. The lack of obstacles would have unnerved her even if she hadn't known their reason; knowing, or suspecting, that the fake Moody was responsible for it made it worse._

 _Then she heard movement right behind her. She held out her wand, ready to attack, but its beam fell only upon Cedric, who had just hurried out of a path on the right-hand side. Cedric looked severely shaken._

 _"A chimera!" he hissed. "A bloody, full-sized chimera! I barely got away with my life!"_

 _He shook his head and dived out of sight before she could react, along another path. Keen to put plenty of distance between herself and a chimera, Addy hurried off again. Then, as she turned a corner, she saw a dementor gliding toward her. Twelve feet tall, its face hidden by its hood, its rotting, scabbed hands outstretched, it advanced, sensing its way blindly toward him. Addy could hear its rattling breath; she felt clammy coldness stealing over her, but knew what she had to do._

 _She pointed her wand and several of them tried to say the spell at the same time. Out of the wand came several patronuses, and the dementor tripped. They realized it was a boggart, and cast Riddikulus instead; the dementor was suddenly wearing robes that looked like they were made for a clown, or else made from a circus tent._

 _Addy used the Riddikulus spell again, and it vanished in a puff of smoke. The patronuses vanished as well, their focus having shifted away. She moved on, quickly and quietly as possible, listening hard, her wand held high once more._

 _Left … right … left again … She couldn't find a staircase up to the third level, or a door to the center, so she went downstairs instead and later went back upstairs. She did the Four-Point Spell and turned a few times on its information. Twice she found herself facing dead ends. She did the Four-Point Spell yet again and found that she was going too far east. She turned back, took a right turn, and saw an odd golden mist floating ahead of her._

 _ _(Allow me),__ _Hypatia said in their head, taking over control of the body. She began analyzing the spell with her wand, to figure out how to get past it. It only took her a minute to work out the solution. She backed up and took the mist at a run, leaping right through it to the other side._

 _Flush with success, Hypatia laid a few trap spells on her side of the obstacle to slow down the others if they came this way, then continued on._

 _A moment later, a scream shattered the silence. They knew instantly that the scream had come from Fleur, and hoped the fake Moody hadn't hurt her too badly. She paused at a junction of two paths to wonder how the fake Moody was getting past whatever spells on the walls were showing all the Champions on the outside walls, before taking the right fork with a feeling of increasing unease, then a staircase up to the third floor._

 _She met nothing for ten minutes, but kept running into dead ends. Twice she took the same wrong turning. Finally, she found a new route and started to jog along it, her wandlight waving, making her shadow flicker and distort on the walls. Then she rounded another corner and found herself facing a chimera._

 _"Nope," she said quietly, going back the other way before it noticed her. She paused just long enough to carve a quick rune into the floor and empowered it to repel anything that tried getting through. It was quick and dirty and wouldn't last long, but hopefully it would last long enough._

 _She took a left path and hit a dead end, a right, and hit another; forcing herself to stop, heart hammering, she performed the Four-Point Spell again, backtracked, and chose a path that would take her northwest._

 _Then the floor suddenly fell out from under her. She Summoned the ceiling so powerfully that she kept from falling down the trap door, and because she'd been running, her momentum carried her across to the other side. She paused to clutch her heart and catch her breath. Then she used her wand to carve a rune into the ceiling to make it resistant to summoning charms in case someone else came this way, before hurrying off again._

Addy had been hurrying along the new path for a few minutes, when she heard something in the path running parallel to her own that made her stop dead.

"What are you doing?" yelled Cedric's voice. "What the hell d'you think you're doing?"

And then Addy heard Krum's voice.

" _Crucio_!"

 _The air was suddenly full of Cedric's yells. The Potters were horrified. What the Hell was the fake Moody_ _ _doing__ _? How the Hell was he getting away with this? She tried a Reductor curse on the wall, and it barely made a dent. There was no way through the wall, then, so she focused on getting away. It would be more efficient for the fake Moody to merely disable or stun the other Champions, rather than killing them, and it would take too long to torture them into insanity. Cedric wouldn't be tortured too badly, she hoped. She kept moving, ignoring the others arguing with her._

 _After a couple wrong turns, she ended up right behind Krum, who was still torturing Cedric. Well that was fortuitous; she took the opportunity to Stun him in the back. He stopped dead in his tracks, fell forward, and lay motionless, face-down on the ground. Addy dashed over to Cedric, who had stopped twitching and was lying there panting, his hands over his face._

"Are you all right?" Addy said roughly, grabbing Cedric's arm.

 _"Not really," panted Cedric. "In pain. But I'll live. I don't believe it! He crept up behind me. I heard him, I turned around, and he had his wand on me."_

 _"He was Imperiused," she said. "Doubtless he took care of Fleur, too. I heard her scream earlier."_

 _"You sound certain he was Imperiused."_

 _She winced internally at her stupid slip-up. "Yes," she said, thinking fast. "He was Imperiused by whoever entered me in this stupid Tournament. I am to die."_

 _ _Dammit, that was over-dramatic.__

 _Cedric stood up, still shaking. "Yeah, that makes sense. I know you and Krum were friends. If you trust him, so do I. If you think he was Imperiused, then he was. Good thing he didn't see you there, or you'd be dead."_

 _"Probably," she lied._

"Should we leave him here?" Cedric muttered.

 _"No," Addy said. "Send up red sparks. It wasn't his fault. We don't want him eaten by that chimera."_

 _"Um, about that. There's a ceiling."_

 _She shrugged. "I dunno. Try it anyway. I mean, they've got some kind of live image of us on the screens, they should see it."_

 _"Then they saw him torturing me, if that's true. And what if whoever Imperiused him knocked out the picture somehow?"_

 _"You raise an excellent point. Well, I know some runes to protect him from monsters, anyway. Mark the spot anyway, just in case."_

 _"Well okay," Cedric said. He raised his wand and shot a shower of red sparks into the air, which hovered at the ceiling above Krum, marking the spot where he lay. Adira, at the same time, carved runes into the floor with her wand and put power in them._

 _"There. That should protect him from the chimera and similar monsters. It's the best I can do without more information."_

 _"Good," Cedric said._

 _Adira and Cedric stood there in the darkness (lit only by the faint glow of the red sparks) for a moment, looking around them. Then Cedric said, "Well … I s'pose we'd better go on."_

 _"Yes," she said._

 _The two of them proceeded up the dark path without speaking, Cedric turning right. Adira waited until he had his back turned and raised her wand to send a Stunner at his back. But something, some sixth sense, must have warned him, because he ducked._

 _"What are you doing? Are you Imperiused, too?" He had his wand pointed at her. She lowered her own wand, to try to defuse the tension._

 _"No. I was trying to save your life!"_

 _"What, by hexing me in the back?"_

 _"It was just a Stunner!"_

 _"Right, stun me in the back so I can't win the Tournament. You know, I'm starting to wonder if Rita Skeeter was right about you. For all I know,_ _ _you__ _Imperiused Krum!"_

 _"If I'd been dumb enough to use illegal dark magic on another Champion just to win some stupid contest that I would literally rather be tortured than be in, when there are spells showing us on giant screens just outside, I would've just let him carry on torturing you! But no, I stopped him."_

 _"To make yourself look like the hero?"_

 _"Right before Stunning you in the back? What would that accomplish?"_

 _Cedric paused, his wand wavering. "I... I honestly don't know."_

 _"If I could tell you more, I would. But I can't. I don't know what's going on, besides someone wanting me dead," she said, though it wasn't entirely honest. Honestly, she was worried she'd said and done too much already, didn't know if the fake Moody or anyone else could see this, but she was trying nonetheless to adhere as much as possible to the terms of her (admittedly forced) oath to the fake Moody, so she had to assume she had an audience, despite evidence to the contrary. Stunning another Champion in the back when they'd thought they'd had a truce was a shitty thing to do, wouldn't look good if it was being displayed on the screens, but it wasn't like she really had much to lose on that front, given she'd likely be dead by the end of the night._

 _"I'm not going to let you stun me, Adira. Even if you're telling the truth—and I'm not convinced you are, because why attack me and Fleur if whoever it is just wants_ _ _you__ _dead? Um... where was I? Right; even if you're telling the truth, I'm not going to let you stun me. Even if whoever wants you dead was also the one attacking me and Fleur, which makes no sense. Because I'm going to win. Hufflepuff needs some glory, we've been the butt of jokes for too long."_

 _"If the stakes weren't life or death, Cedric, I would put the minimum amount of effort into this Task and_ _ _let__ _you win."_

 _"I'd like to believe that. Either way, I'm going, and you're not going to stop me."_

 _"Fine. Go then, if you're so sure you're safe. I'll even let you watch me walk away."_

 _ _Chandra, can you do wandless magic without pointing?__

 _ _~I do not know, Gracious Host. What do you want me to attempt?~__

 _ _Stop Cedric, for his own safety. Take him out of the game. I don't care how, as long as it breaks no laws or school rules.__

 _ _~I shall attempt it.~__

 _ _(No, I have a better idea),__ _Hypatia said._ _ _(I can't guarantee it will work, since I've never attempted this before, but it's worth a shot.)__

 _ _Do it then.__

 _"Okay," Cedric said, only a few seconds having passed. "So go already. I'll wait."_

 _Adira heard, inside her head, Hypatia very loudly 'shout' the incantation 'Legilimens,' at the same time she lifted the wand and pointed it at Cedric. A flood of images from Cedric's life entered her brain – Cedric with Cho at the Yule Ball, some scenes with him and his parents, Cedric watching the Quidditch Cup, Cedric running from the Death Eaters at the Cup. She didn't know what Hypatia was attempting, until she started feeling Hypatia doing something to the stream. It almost felt like she was trying to switch the direction of the spell to send Cedric images from her own mind, but she was struggling mightily with it._

 _Before Hypatia could make any real progress on that front, the connection was abruptly shattered by a stinging hex from Cedric. Then, despite the fact his head had to be hurting like Hell, Cedric started firing a bunch of other hexes at her. Chandra started singing the spell in their head for the ablative shield spell as Hypatia used his 'singing wand spells' technique to fire her own spells at Cedric._

 _Whether because of his doubtlessly aching head or being afraid by her dueling capabilities, Cedric stopped holding back, sending spells after her that included transfigurations and conjurations, but was backing up as he did. She soon figured out what was going on, and quickly bolted in the other direction before he could do the same first. She'd just have to hope they didn't run into one another again._

 _She used the Four-Point Spell to verify she was going the right way. Every dead end or staircase infuriated her and filled her with more panic. What if Cedric touched the Cup first? Could Voldemort use him instead? Would Luna be safe? Would the fake Moody accept that she'd tried her best? Would the oath she swore feel the same way?_

 _Then, as she strode down a long, straight path, she saw movement once again, and her beam of wandlight hit an extraordinary creature, one which she had only seen in picture form, in her_ _ _Monster Book of Monsters.__

It was a sphinx. It had the body of an over-large lion: great clawed paws and a long yellowish tail ending in a brown tuft. Its head, however, was that of a woman. She turned her long, almond-shaped eyes upon Adira as she approached. She raised her wand, hesitating. She was not crouching as if to spring, but pacing from side to side of the path, blocking their progress. Then she spoke, in a deep, hoarse voice.

 _"You are very near your goal. The quickest way is past me. I will ask a riddle. Answer on your first guess — I let you pass. Answer wrongly — I attack. Remain silent — I will let you walk away from me unscathed."_

 _"Ask me your riddle then," Hypatia said with Adira's voice. "I'm in a hurry."_

" _First think of the person who lives in disguise,_

 _Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies._

 _Next, tell me what's always the last thing to mend,_

 _The middle of middle and end of the end_?

 _And finally give me the sound often heard_

 _During the search for a hard-to-find word._

 _Now string them together, and answer me this,_

 _Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss_?"

 _Hypatia glared at the sphinx. She could doubtless solve the riddle with enough time, but it wasn't her kind of riddle, unlike the math riddle in the Second Task, and she didn't know how far Cedric had gotten, and she couldn't afford to waste time. Still, she didn't know if she could fight a sphinx. She looked around, calculating trajectories and probabilities with one set of constructs while setting another to the riddle._

 _"A spider!"_ _Zoey said with Adira's voice, less than a second after Hypatia had set a construct to the riddle._

 _Their stomach clenched in fretful anxiety, afraid she'd doomed them to fighting or running for their lives. But then the sphinx smiled broadly. She got up, stretched her front legs, and then moved aside for them to pass._

 _"Thanks," Adira said as she ran through the gap._

She had to be close now, she had to be. … her wand was telling her she was bang on course; as long as she didn't meet anything too horrible, she might have a chance.

Addy broke into a run. She had a choice of paths up ahead. " _Point Me_!" she whispered again to her wand, and it spun around and pointed her to the right-hand one. She dashed up this one and saw light ahead.

The Triwizard Cup was gleaming on a plinth a hundred yards away. Suddenly a dark figure hurtled out onto the path in front of her.

Cedric was going to get there first. Cedric was sprinting as fast as he could toward the cup, and Addy knew she would never catch up, Cedric was much taller, had much longer legs —

Then Addy saw something immense over a wall to Cedric's left, moving quickly along a path that intersected with his own; it was moving so fast Cedric was about to run into it, and Cedric, his eyes on the cup, had not seen it —

 _"Cedric!" Addy bellowed. "On your left!"_

 _Despite their earlier fight, Cedric looked around just in time to hurl himself past the thing and avoid colliding with it, but in his haste, he tripped. She saw his wand fly out of his hand as a gigantic spider stepped into the path and began to bear down upon Cedric._

 _ _"ACCIO__ _CEDRIC!" she shouted, and the boy flew through the air toward her._

 _The acromantula changed directions towards Addy, who immediately went into their new battle mode and sent a dozen stunners at the thing. Most of the stunners bounced off, but she kept it up, and finally some hit the soft underside of the beast, knocking it out. It came to a crashing halt inches from the two of them._

 _"Addy! Are you alright?"_

 _"Yes. And you?"_

 _"I hit the ground pretty hard when you Summoned me, but I don't think it's bleeding, just bruised. I don't think I broke anything."_

 _ _"Accio__ _Cedric's wand," she said, and his wand flew through the air. She was planning to catch it and Stun Cedric, but Cedric leaped into the air and caught it first._

 _"Cedric, please believe me when I say you don't want to touch that Cup," she hissed just loud enough for him to hear, hoping the spells showing the Champions wouldn't be able to pick it up. "It's certain death for whoever touches it."_

 _"Still trying to win, despite your brief moment of weakness saving my life?"_

 _"For FUCK'S SAKE," she hissed. "It's a Hogwart's victory either way, and I'm already loaded; my parents left me_ _ _millions__ _of galleons, so I need the money like I need dragon pox. And I'm already world famous even though I_ _ _detest__ _it, so I need the fame like I need a hole in the head. We tried running away to avoid getting out of this stupid contest, when a vision warned us this would happen. Even SPLINCHED myself doing it! If it wasn't life or death, I'd have half-assed my way through this whole maze and let literally_ _ _anyone else__ _beat me to it! If it didn't know that touching that Cup would be certain death, I'd have just sat here and let you take the fucking thing already!"_

 _Cedric looked uncertain again, looking between her and the Cup several times._

 _ _ **Fuck this**__ _ _,__ _Al thought._ _ _"Accio__ _Triwizard Cup!"_

 _The Cup didn't move. But Cedric rounded on her._

 _"Nice try!"_

 _"I only wanted to get this over with. I'm on a deadline, and you were wasting time dithering."_

 _Alastair saw Cedric's intentions in his eyes almost too late. He sent a Stunner at them, and Al made the body duck and hit the ground just in time to make it look like they'd been hit. He felt Cedric's emotions change as he turned to take the Cup, and Summoned Cedric again, the boy flying through the air as Al jumped up and bolted for the Cup, the body transforming to his form as he did. But the Summoning Charm was much weaker this time, and Cedric got up and followed them, the both of them grabbing the Cup at the same time._

 _Instantly, Al felt a jerk somewhere behind his navel. His feet had left the ground. He could not unclench the hand holding the Triwizard Cup; it was pulling him onward in a howl of wind and swirling color, Cedric at his side._

 _Al felt his feet slam into the ground. He immediately forced Zoey into control of the body and told her what to do. She grabbed Cedric's arm; he glowed, shrinking, and became a mouse. She let him go, and he sat there shaking._

 _"I_ _ _told__ _you this was life or death," Al hissed at him. "Voldemort is on his way. Run!"_

 _Cedric didn't need telling twice; with a squeak of surprise, he ran off into the tall grass of the unkempt cemetery. For now that he was able to look around, Chandra's shield up and their wand out for a fight, he saw they were in a cemetery. He thought about running himself, but he had vowed to face Voldemort, so he had to wait until he saw the evil git before he could run. He hoped that merely facing Voldemort's direction when the git appeared would count as 'facing' him, to the oath._

 _They had obviously traveled miles — perhaps hundreds of miles — for even the mountains surrounding the castle were gone. The black outline of a small church was visible beyond a large yew tree to their right. A hill rose above them to their left. Al could just make out the outline of a fine old house on the hillside. Al was still tense, ready for a battle, waiting for a direction to fire in._

 _Finally, he saw a figure in the distance. It was fuzzy and indistinct in the slight mist. They watched the figure drawing nearer, walking steadily toward them between the graves, waiting for it to get in range of their wand. They couldn't make out a face, but from the way it was walking and holding its arms, he could tell that it was carrying something. Whoever it was, they were tall, and wearing a hooded cloak pulled up over their head to obscure their face. And — several paces nearer, the gap between them closing all the time — Al saw that the thing in the person's arms looked like a baby … or was it merely a bundle of robes? He kept watching warily, unsure if this was a threat or not, though the odds were good it was a threat._

 _The figure stopped beside a towering marble headstone, only six feet from them. For a second, Al and the figure looked at one another._

 _And then, without warning, their scar exploded with pain. It was agony such as they had never felt in all their life; despite their best effort, their wand slipped from his fingers as he put his hands over his face; his knees buckled; he was on the ground and he could see nothing at all; his head was about to split open._

 _"Ooh, is wittle bitty baby Potter having a booboo head?" came a woman's voice, speaking in baby talk. Even in his pain, Al recognized it as the voice of the woman who had been enjoying being tortured... as well as the voice of one Bellatrix LeStrange, from one of those pensieve memories._

 _"Po wittle baby Potter an his wittle booboo head. But don't worry, bitty baby Potter, the pain will go away soon, because you'll be dead." She laughed at him, and it reminded him of the Muggle stereotype of a witch's cackle._

 _Still holding her bundle, she used her wand to drag Al along toward the marble headstone. Al saw the name upon it flickering in the wandlight before he was forced around and slammed against it._

TOM RIDDLE

 _The cloaked woman was now conjuring tight cords around Al, tying him from neck to ankles to the headstone._

 _"You should feel honored, baby Potter," she said as she worked. "You're going to help my master rise again, before he kills you. Baby Potter can die knowing his mommy sacrificed herself for nothing, now won't that be fun?"_

 _"I'd tell you to burn in Hell," Al said, "but from what I saw the other day, you'd probably just enjoy it. Tell me, do you orgasm when Moldyshorts tortures you?"_

 _She backhanded him so hard he felt blood._

 _"How_ _ _DARE__ _you mock him? How dare you mangle the name of the greatest wizard to ever live?"_

 _"I didn't say_ _ _anything__ _about Merlin, though."_

 _"IMPUDENT-"_

 _"Bellatrix," a high, cold voice said from the bundle in her arms, "he is stalling. Ignore him. His words are nothing but the mewling of a helpless child."_

 _"Of course, Master. Thank you for bringing me to my senses."_

 _"Yes. And Bella, remember, they have the Philosopher's Stone inside their worthless body somehow. You've been itching to torture someone, I suggest you try it on Potter."_

 _"You'll never get it," Al said, as calmly as he could. "It has to be taken out willingly, by one of us – Zoey to be accurate. She's the only one who can do it, and we won't let you have it. There's too many of us. No matter how hard you try to torture us, we won't let you have it. We're legion, and willful. You'll end up torturing us into insanity like Frank and Alice Longbottom before we'll crack. And if that happens, not even Nicolas Flamel will be able to get it. Not even Dumbledore."_

 _Voldemort sighed._

 _"I can feel the truth in his words, Bella. Oh well, you shall have to wait. It was a long shot, I knew that, which is why we have the ritual ready to go instead. Let us do it_ _ _now__ _!"_

 _Bellatrix rushed to obey. Once sure that she'd bound him so tightly to the headstone that he couldn't move an inch, she drew a length of some black material from the inside of her cloak and stuffed it roughly into his mouth; then, without a word, she turned from Al and hurried away. Al couldn't make a sound, nor could he see where Bellatrix had gone; he couldn't turn his head to see beyond the headstone; he could see only what was right in front of him._

 _Al felt a furry little body brush his fingers, and knew somehow that it was Cedric. He used his limited finger mobility to push Cedric-the-mouse away, trying to communicate that the older boy should run and hide. Cedric tried chewing the ropes, and Al pushed him away again. A couple more times he had to do this before Cedric got the point and scampered off._

 _Some twenty feet away, Al saw their wand. He also realized she hadn't checked him for a spare wand. Not that this knowledge helped him; the spare was up his left sleeve, and he was tied very tight to the headstone. But he could do wandless magic, too._

 _With that thought, Chandra began singing inside their shared headspace. The ropes came away, and Al broke out. He grabbed his spare wand and ran at Bellatrix, who easily disarmed him with a spell. He kept running and grabbed her arm, not knowing what he was doing, he was so angry. She laughed at him, but suddenly the laughter turned to screams as her skin burned and blistered where he was grabbing her. He was so astonished himself he almost let go, but instead held on tighter, pouring more energy into the effort, even though he had no idea how this was possible._

 _"How is this possible?" Voldemort screeched. "You left your Muggle relatives_ _ _years__ _ago!_ _ _HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?"__

 _Bellatrix managed to get hold of a knife, and stabbed Al in the right arm so hard he yelped and let go of her. But by then, the damage was done; her right arm was burning up so badly that it wouldn't be there much longer. She made to cut it off, but Voldemort stopped her._

 _"NO! The ritual! Do the ritual first! You can sacrifice the ruined limb, the fire hasn't spread that far yet!"_

 _She did stop in time, setting the knife aside and using her wand to tie Al back down, shoved the wad of cloth back into his mouth, hitting him with a Full Body Bind and a Confundus for good measure, though it was a weak one in her haste and it faded fast. She collected some of his blood in a glass vial and set it aside as well._

 _Struggling to work through the pain of her still-burning arm, she moved an enormous stone cauldron to the foot of the grave with her body instead of her wand. It was full of what seemed to be water — even in pain from his arm, Al could hear it slopping around — and it was larger than any cauldron Al had ever used; a great stone belly large enough for a full-grown man to sit in._

 _The thing inside the bundle of robes on the ground was stirring more persistently, as though it was trying to free itself. Now Bellatrix was busying herself at the bottom of the cauldron with a wand. Suddenly there were crackling flames beneath it. A large snake Al hadn't noticed before suddenly slithered away into the darkness._

The liquid in the cauldron seemed to heat very fast. The surface began not only to bubble, but to send out fiery sparks, as though it were on fire. Steam was thickening, blurring the outline of Bellatrix tending the fire. The movements beneath the robes became more agitated. And Al heard the high, cold voice again.

" _Hurry_!"

The whole surface of the water was alight with sparks now. It might have been encrusted with diamonds.

"It is ready, Master," she said in a pained voice.

" _Now_ …" said the cold voice.

Bellatrix pulled open the robes on the ground, revealing what was inside them, and Al let out a yell that was strangled in the wad of material blocking his mouth.

 _It was as though she had flipped over a stone and revealed something ugly, slimy, and blind — but worse, a hundred times worse. The thing Bellatrix had been carrying had the shape of a crouched human child, except that Al had never seen anything less like a child. It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its face — no child alive ever had a face like that — flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes._

 _The thing seemed almost helpless; it raised its thin arms, put them around Bellatrix's neck, and she lifted it. As she did so, her hood fell down, and Al saw her face contorted in agony as she struggled to carry the creature to the rim of the cauldron. For one moment, Al saw the evil, flat face illuminated in the sparks dancing on the surface of the potion. And then Bellatrix lowered the creature into the cauldron; there was a hiss, and it vanished below the surface; Al heard its frail body hit the bottom with a soft thud._

 _ _ **Hope it drowns,**__ _he thought vehemently. His arm and head both hurt so badly he could no longer think well enough to try escape again._

 _Bellatrix was speaking. Her voice shook with pain as she did. She raised her wand, closed her eyes, and spoke into the night._

 _"_ _ _Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son__ _!"_

 _The surface of the grave at Al's feet cracked. Horrified, Al watched as a fine trickle of dust rose into the air at Bellatrix's command and fell softly into the cauldron. The diamond surface of the water broke and hissed; it sent sparks in all directions and turned a vivid, poisonous-looking blue._

 _Bellatrix pulled a long, thin, shining silver dagger from inside her robes. Despite being in pain, she smiled a little here._

 _"_ _ _Flesh of the servant, willingly given, you will revive your master!"__

 _She stretched her blackened right arm in front of her, gripped the dagger tight, and swung it up. He realized what she was about to do a second before it happened — he closed his eyes as tightly as he could, but he could not block the scream that pierced the night, that went through him as though he had been stabbed with the dagger too. Then there was a splash as her arm fell into the water. Al couldn't stand to look … but the potion had turned a burning red; the light of it shone through his closed eyelids._

 _Bellatrix was hissing and gasping with agony._

 _"_ _ _Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken, you will resurrect your foe!__ _"_

 _Al opened his eyes to see her use the blood she'd collected from him in the potion. The liquid within turned, instantly, a blinding white. Her job done, Bellatrix pulled a glass jar from her robes, taking something out of it to smear over her left hand, then smeared the stuff over her bleeding stump. Skin immediately grew over the exposed muscle and bone._

The cauldron was simmering, sending its diamond sparks in all directions, so blindingly bright that it turned all else to velvety blackness. Nothing happened.

 _ **Let it have drowned**_ _,_ Al thought, _**let it have gone wrong.**_

And then, suddenly, the sparks emanating from the cauldron were extinguished. A surge of white steam billowed thickly from the cauldron instead, obliterating everything in front of Al, so that he couldn't see anything but vapor hanging in the air. _It's gone wrong,_ Adira thought … _it's drowned_ … _please_ … _please let it be dead._

But then, through the mist in front of him, he saw, with an icy surge of terror, the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron.

 _"Robe me," said the high, cold voice from behind the steam, and Bellatrix, no longer in pain, hurried forward to robe him with a delighted look of awe and wonder on her face, pulling them on one-handed over her master's head._

The thin man stepped out of the cauldron, staring at Al … and Al stared back into the face that had haunted their nightmares for three years. Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snake's with slits for nostrils …

 _Lord Voldemort had risen again._

 _Voldemort looked away from Al and began examining his own body. His hands were like large, pale spiders; his long white fingers caressed his own chest, his arms, his face; the red eyes, whose pupils were slits, like a cat's, gleamed still more brightly through the darkness. He held up his hands and flexed the fingers, his expression rapt and exultant. Al wanted to tell him to get a room with himself, but he didn't have the energy for sass yet._

 _Voldemort slipped one of those unnaturally long-fingered hands into a deep pocket and drew out a wand. He caressed it gently too._

 _"Thank you, Bella dear, for your hard work, dedication, and loyalty," Voldemort said. "And, of course, for your sacrifice. You will be greatly rewarded."_

 _"The honor is all mine, my lord," she said, bowing so low she could probably kiss his feet if she'd chosen to._

 _"I will reward you in a bit, Bella dear, but first, hold out your remaining arm for me, please."_

 _"Yes, Master," she said, stepping forward to hold out her left arm._

 _Old snake-face rolled up the sleeve of her arm to reveal a vivid red mark on her arm, a miniature red version of the Dark Mark that had appeared in the sky last summer. Even in his poor state, Al made note of this fact._

"It is back," he said softly, "they will all have noticed it … and now, we shall see … now we shall know…"

He pressed his long white forefinger to the brand on Bellatrix's arm.

 _The scar on Al's forehead seared with a sharp pain again, and Bellatrix's eyes rolled back in her head while her face looked ecstatic; Voldemort removed his fingers from her mark, and Al saw that it had turned jet black._

A look of cruel satisfaction on his face, Voldemort straightened up, threw back his head, and stared around at the dark graveyard.

 _"How many will be brave enough to return when they feel it?" he whispered, his gleaming red eyes fixed upon the stars. "And how many will be foolish enough to stay away?"_

 _ _ **Oh for the love of Merlin, just kill me already and have done with it,**__ _Al thought. He_ _ _really__ _did not feel like listening to this man's evil monologue._

 _Voldemort began to pace up and down before Al and Bellatrix, his eyes sweeping the graveyard all the while. After a minute or so, he looked down at Al again, a cruel smile twisting his snakelike face._

 _"You stand, Harry Potter, upon the remains of my late father," he hissed softly. "A Muggle and a fool … very like your dear mother. But they both had their uses, did they not? Your mother died to defend you as a child … and I killed my father, and see how useful he has proved himself, in death."_

 _Voldemort laughed again. Up and down he paced, looking all around him as he walked, and the snake continued to circle in the grass._

 _Al groaned. Was it really so hard to remember Adira's new name? Kill them, sure, but even mortal enemies deserved to have their gender respected. Al would honor Voldemort's gender if he decided to suddenly become a Dark Lady, why couldn't Snake-Face do him the same courtesy? Oh right, he was the wizard version of a Nazi; fascists hate anyone different from themselves. Al focused some of his Will and made the wad of material pop out of his mouth. It also broke the Body Bind, which was weak to begin with._

 _"My mother was a_ _ _witch__ _, you worthless sack of crap," Al said._

 _"Crucio!" Voldemort cried, and Al felt every nerve in his body light up in agony briefly._

 _"That is but a small taste of what I will do to you later. Speak out of turn again and I will skip to the true torture earlier than planned!"_

 _ _ **I'd rather be Crucioed than listen to you yammer on,**__ _Al thought but didn't say aloud._

 _Bellatrix got up and shoved the wad of cloth back into his mouth, before sitting down to listen to her master again._

 _"Anyway, where was I?" Voldemort asked. "Oh yes. You see that house upon the hillside, Potter? My father lived there. My mother, a witch who lived here in this village, fell in love with him. But he abandoned her when she told him what she was. … He didn't like magic, my father._

 _ _ **Blah blah blah I have daddy issues, listen to me bitch and moan, Potter, about how bad I had it. A literal captive audience,**__ _Al thought._

 _Voldemort was still talking. Al rolled his eyes. "Yes, Potter, he left her and returned to his Muggle parents before I was even born, and she died giving birth to me, leaving me to be raised in a Muggle orphanage … but I vowed to find him … I revenged myself upon him, that fool who gave me his name …_ _ _Tom Riddle__ _."_

 _ _ **So I take it this means Bellatrix already knows,**__ _he thought. He glanced at Bellatrix. She was listening raptly, but looked unsurprised and unconcerned by the knowledge._

Still he paced, his red eyes darting from grave to grave.

"Listen to me, reliving family history," he said quietly, "why, I am growing quite sentimental. … But look, Harry! My _true_ family returns."

The air was suddenly full of the swishing of cloaks, distracting him. Between graves, behind the yew tree, in every shadowy space, wizards were Apparating. All of them were hooded and masked. And one by one they moved forward … slowly, cautiously, as though they could hardly believe their eyes. Voldemort stood in silence, waiting for them. Then one of the Death Eaters fell to his knees, crawled toward Voldemort, and kissed the hem of his black robes.

"Master … Master …" he murmured. Al sighed heavily.

 _The Death Eaters behind him did the same; each of them approaching Voldemort on his knees and kissing his robes, before backing away and standing up, forming a silent circle, which enclosed Tom Riddle's grave, Al, Voldemort, and Bellatrix._

Yet they left gaps in the circle, as though waiting for more people. Voldemort, however, did not seem to expect more. He looked around at the hooded faces, and though there was no wind, a rustling seemed to run around the circle, as though it had shivered.

"Welcome, Death Eaters," said Voldemort quietly. "Thirteen years … thirteen years since last we met. Yet you answer my call as though it were yesterday. … We are still united under the Dark Mark, then! _Or are we_?"

He put back his terrible face and sniffed, his slit-like nostrils widening.

 _"I smell guilt," he said. "There is a stench of guilt upon the air."_

 _Al suddenly noticed he wasn't bleeding anymore. As Voldemort kept yammering on, Hypatia setting a construct to listen to it all and remember in case any of it proved useful for escaping alive, they focused instead on what to do to get out of this situation alive._

 _ _Are there any rituals we could do, Hypatia?__

 _ _(With as much as we've been through in the last hour or so? Bleeding and adrenaline crashes and stuff? Without any hope of getting a hair off that idiot's bald body? I can't think of a gods-damned thing. I mean sure, apparently we still somehow have that Mother's Protection business going on, no idea how__ _ _ **that**__ _ _happened, but I'll bet that won't work now he's used our blood.)__

 _ _How about sacrificing some of our own magic for something? Would that work?__

 _ _(Possibly. Sacrificing all of one's magic for a certain amount of time is very powerful. It could be useful.)__

 _ _What kind of thing might help us out here?__

 _ _(Well the most efficient use of the ritual would be getting away. But we don't really know how to Apparate yet; we got splinched the one time we tried, and he might have wards up to prevent anyone Apparating away.)__

 _ _ **I'd take that risk, to get away from here alive.**__

 _ _(Yes, but last time you only lost a foot. What if it's more serious next time? It could kill us before we could be put back together.)__

 _ _ **Maybe a Patronus? We could get a message to Dumbledore and Sirius.**__

 _ _(That's a very conspicuous spell, the Patronus. And all it would take to knock out the Patronus would be to knock__ _ _ **us**__ _ _out.)__

 _ _ **What if we supercharge it with a ritual? I mean, if it's powered by a ritual, doesn't that mean it would keep going even if we got knocked out or died? Then at least people would know he was back.**__

 _There was a pause then, as she thought about it._

 _ _(Yes, the arithmancy checks out. Wand spells powered by ritual sacrifices have the kind of staying power you talked about. We'd have to sacrifice at least a month's worth of magic, though, to make it that far. I don't know how far away from Hogwarts we are, after all.)__

 _ _Yeah, let's do that. Do the maths on it, Hypatia.__

 _ _(Right. You lot think of other things too, while I sort that out. We'll need a distraction of some sort, keep these berks busy while I do the chanting and runes and other stuff necessary. Also, if you can come up with a getaway plan that doesn't require us to use any magic, that would be great. I'd prefer to live, if at all possible.)__

 _ _% About that, Hypatia, %__ _came the voice of Avani Maznah, AKA Mother,_ _ _% I have some ideas about Patronuses you can use. Give the thing enough power, and it could be a useful weapon against humans. It's not common knowledge around here, but Patronuses can be empowered to destroy dementors. There's two ways of doing it, and of those two, one of them also works against mortal foes. %__

 _ _(How the heck does__ _ _ **that**__ _ _work?)__

 _ _% Dementors are partially solid. Break through the solid robe and skin, and the light of a Patronus can kill a dementor. The power needed to break through that robe and skin gives it power against mortal foes, too. %__

 _ _(Well holy crap. If the rest of you can make a long enough and good enough diversion, we might be in for a chance at surviving this.)__

 _ _ **How long do you need?**__

 _ _(Two minutes at the very least. Three if you can swing it.)__

 _ _Right then. Time to get to work.__

 _Something was happening on the outside. Voldemort's speech had turned to them._

 _"Yes," said Voldemort, a grin curling his lipless mouth as the eyes of the circle flashed in Al's direction. "Harry Potter has kindly joined us for my rebirthing party. One might go so far as to call him my guest of honor."_

 _There was a silence. Then the Death Eater to the right of Bellatrix stepped forward, and Lucius Malfoy's voice spoke from under the mask._

 _"Master, we crave to know … we beg you to tell us … how you have achieved this … this miracle … how you managed to return to us."_

"Ah, what a story it is, Lucius," said Voldemort. "And it begins — and ends — with my young friend here."

He walked lazily over to stand next to Al, so that the eyes of the whole circle were upon the two of them. The snake continued to circle.

"You know, of course, that they have called this boy my downfall?" Voldemort said softly, his red eyes upon Al, whose scar began to burn so fiercely that he almost screamed in agony. "You all know that on the night I lost my powers and my body, I tried to kill him. His mother died in the attempt to save him — and unwittingly provided him with a protection I admit I had not foreseen. I could not touch the boy."

Voldemort raised one of his long white fingers and put it very close to Al's cheek.

 _"His mother left upon him the traces of her sacrifice. This is old magic, I should have remembered it, I was foolish to overlook it; but no matter. I can touch him now."_

Al felt the cold tip of the long white finger touch him, and thought his head would burst with the pain. Voldemort laughed softly in his ear, then took the finger away and continued addressing the Death Eaters.

 _"I miscalculated, my friends, I admit it. My curse was deflected by the woman's foolish sacrifice, and it rebounded upon myself. Aaah … pain beyond pain, my friends; nothing could have prepared me for it. I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost … but still, I was alive. What I was, even I do not know … I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality. You know my goal — to conquer death. And now, I was tested, and it appeared that one or more of my experiments had worked … for I had not been killed, though the curse should have done it. Nevertheless, I was as powerless as the weakest creature alive, and without the means to help myself … for I had no body, and every spell that might have helped me required the use of a wand."_

 _"Blah blah blah! Gods, you sure love the sound of your own voice," Al said. He'd gotten the cloth out of his mouth again._

 _Voldemort laughed at him. "Willful little pestilence, I'll grant you that. Such cheek in the face of death. But hush, I was talking!"_

 _Al felt a silencing charm being cast on his person. Since he was mostly still focused on thinking of a diversion, he didn't fight it._

 _"Now where was I? Oh yes, the years I spent bodiless and abandoned by my supposedly faithful followers. Yes, I remember only forcing myself, sleeplessly, endlessly, second by second, to exist. … I settled in a faraway place, in a forest, and I waited. … Surely, one of my faithful Death Eaters would try and find me … one of them would come and perform the magic I could not, to restore me to a body … but I waited in vain. …"_

 _The shiver ran once more around the circle of listening Death Eaters. Voldemort let the silence spiral horribly before continuing. Al started to tune it out again, as it was plain this was going to take a long bloody time. What was it with megalomaniacs and loving the sound of their own voice so much?_

 _Anyway, they had the beginnings of an idea forming for their diversion. It had been inspired by something in a list Hypatia had given them of the things she could do so far. Al thought it would be funny as Hell if they used something to make themselves look like a more powerful Dark Lord on the rise, something that would have an even greater impact on the assembled Death Eaters if the rest of their plan worked._

 _And getting away, well that was interesting. Hypatia had sensed some magic remaining in the Triwizard Cup, and Mother had identified it as a return trip on the portkey. Al didn't know why that was, but Hypatia casually mentioned one way to have gotten them here was to redirect an already-made Portkey to make a detour on the way to its original destination. Another option was that Voldemort wanted to surprise everyone at the Tournament by slaughtering as many of the spectators as possible, which with even the small numbers the assembled Death Eaters had would surely get lots of people killed before Dumbledore stepped in. But that was very risky to Voldemort's side, since he had to rebuild and there was no way to Apparate out of Hogwarts._

 _Also, you needed Ministry approval to cast the Portkey spell, and the Triwizard Cup would be so carefully guarded that the only way to cast the Portkey spell on it was to do so with Ministry approval. Likely that meant the Cup was intended to take the winner to the front of the maze building so everyone could see right away who'd won and celebrate the victory rather than waiting for the Champion to find their way back out of the maze. So Hypatia decided the more likely scenario was a hacked Portkey. Which meant that all they had to do was grab it, and it would take them to wherever the Portkey had been originally intended to go, which was most likely right to Dumbledore's feet, or nearly so._

 _So all they had to figure out was the exact details of the diversion, and a way to get the Portkey without being able to use magic._

 _Suddenly remembering Cedric, they wondered if they could get him to come back, and transform him back into a human. That would take care of both the diversion and getting the Portkey, if it worked and he didn't die in the process. But how to get his attention? With an exertion of Willpower that left them sweating and exhausted, they broke the Silencing Charm._

 _"Psst, Cedric?" Al stage-whispered out of the corner of his mouth as Voldemort kept rambling on, oblivious. "Cedric, can you hear me?"_

 _He tried it a few more times before he felt a furry face against his finger._

 _"Good. I'll need a diversion later. And I'll need you to Summon the Triwizard Cup in such a way we can both grab it. It should take us home, don't ask how I know. Squeak twice if you understand me, three times if you don't."_

 _There came, just barely audible, the sound of two squeaks. Excellent._

 _"Free me now if you can, then attack Voldemort as soon as you're human," Al whispered. "Understand?"_

 _A pause, then two squeaks. Good. This might just work, if he could turn Cedric human before he was murdered. He felt Cedric chewing on the ropes. Al could have freed himself, but that could have drawn attention to them, and Voldemort and his stupid minions were still distracted by Voldemort's big Supervillain Monologue._

 _"...And here he is, the boy you all believed had been my downfall."_

Voldemort moved slowly forward and turned to face Al. He raised his wand.

 _"_ _ _Crucio__ _!"_

It wasn't like the last time he'd hit them with that curse; that one was a love-tap by comparison. This time, it was pain beyond anything they'd ever experienced; their very bones were on fire; his head was surely splitting along his scar; his eyes were rolling madly in his head; he wanted it to end … to black out … to die …

And then it was gone. He was hanging limply in the ropes binding him to the headstone of Voldemort's father, looking up into those bright red eyes through a kind of mist. The night was ringing with the sound of the Death Eaters' laughter.

"You see, I think, how foolish it was to suppose that this boy could ever have been stronger than me," said Voldemort. "But I want there to be no mistake in anybody's mind. Harry Potter escaped me by a lucky chance. And I am now going to prove my power by killing him, here and now, in front of you all, when there is no Dumbledore to help him, and no mother to die for him. I will give him his chance. He will be allowed to fight, and you will be left in no doubt which of us is the stronger. Just a little longer, Nagini," he whispered, and the snake glided away through the grass to where the Death Eaters stood watching.

 _"Now untie him, Bellatrix, and give him back his wand."_

 _"Which one, My Lord? He had two."_

 _"The first wand, I think. It seems to be his primary wand. We don't want_ _ _any__ _doubt of my superiority, Bella."_

 _She nodded and fetched the holly wand._

 _ _ **Well now**__ _ _ **that**__ _ _ **was foolish of him**__ _, Al thought._ _ _ **Why not just kill us while we're helpless? It's what I'd have done, if I were an evil, murderous narcissist with delusions of adequacy.**__ _He thanked his lucky stars Voldemort was apparently an overconfident moron. The fact that Voldemort was likely correct in his assessment didn't help Al's mood._

 _Bellatrix approached him warily, since the protection of his mother's blood would still work on her. She cut his ropes from a distance with her wand, and stepped back, then tossed the holly wand at him._

 _Now was the time for action. He wouldn't give Moldyshorts a single moment to react. He caught the wand midair, touched Cedric and poured a dispelling charm into the tiny mouse body, and said, "NOW!"_

 _Cedric ran behind the gravestone in mid-transformation, Al joining him shortly. Cedric started shooting off a barrage of spells at Voldemort as Hypatia cut Al's arm afresh with a spell, using the blood to write runes all over her skin._

 _"Give us two minutes, preferably three if you can," she told Cedric with Al's voice._

 _Cedric nodded, still casting spells at Voldemort, even though he looked terrified._

 _As she started drawing the runes on their skin, Voldemort screamed, "NO! Leave them to me! They're just children, they will die by my hand alone!"_

 _Voldemort started shooting his own spells at the gravestone. The first spells hit is so hard the stone cracked in half and rained dust on the two of them. Chandra started singing inside their mind, causing the ablative shield to go around both of them and the gravestone. This weakened the shield spell, but it bought Hypatia more time, and spells could still be sent out from it, so Cedric kept firing whatever he could think of at Voldemort._

 _The Death Eaters weren't happy; they were worried for their master, and pacing; they wanted to help crush the impertinent whelps, but they had their orders. They watched in amazement as Voldemort's powerful spells broke layer after layer of the ablative shield, but even though Chandra and the others were feeling the strain, Chandra kept new layers of the shield coming as fast as Voldemort could break them. It helped that the few times he wasn't fast enough, Cedric's own shield or the remains of the gravestone blocked the incoming spells. As it was, Cedric had to take precious moments to repair the gravestone as well as he could so it didn't come crashing on top of their heads, but it wasn't very well done in his haste. If it broke again, he was prepared to shove it forward with a Banishing Charm, grab Al, and run like hell._

 _Hypatia finished the runes and began chanting, tuning out the noise of spells flying through the air in both directions, and the occasional sound of the gravestone getting blasted again. After a minute of chanting, the power around Al as Hypatia worked got high enough in intensity that it was beginning to make the hairs on the back of everyone's necks rise up._

 _"They're doing some kind of ritual! Stop them!" Voldemort shouted. "But don't kill them, that's for me to do!"_

 _The Death Eaters now in the game, the spells flying at them intensified. Cedric started conjuring things to take as many of the hits as possible so Chandra's shield wouldn't be fully penetrated yet. He also kept an eye out for Death Eaters circling around behind them, as much as he could, but it was getting more difficult; a war on multiple fronts is never easy._

 _Trying to help Cedric, Chandra summoned his own wand to his hand and peppered his shield-song with bits of casting song, sending debris flying everywhere whenever dozens of his Reductors and other related spells would hit the ground, other gravestones, or the occasional unlucky Death Eater. Luckily, this did not seem to slow down Hypatia's chanting, the runes on their skin glowing brighter. Still, it was challenging with all of them trying to have the body doing three things at once, when those things were so energy-intensive. They were sweating so bad their eyes burned, since they couldn't spare even a second to wipe the sweat from their brow._

 _Finally, the myriad spells flying at them broke through Chandra's shield, and the gravestone exploded in Cedric's face, nearly stunning Chandra and the others from the force of the stone shrapnel cutting into their head. Al was almost certain they'd lost an ear, and they could no longer hear what Hypatia was chanting because their ears were ringing. Which meant she couldn't hear, either. But somehow she'd managed to keep chanting while barely pausing from having a bloody gravestone_ _ _explode in her face__ _. She bolted for another gravestone, still chanting as she did._

 _When they were in position again, Al looked back and saw Cedric was moving slowly, like he was barely conscious. Al Summoned Cedric again, the older boy's body dragging across the ground in a painful looking way, but finally Cedric was behind cover, too._

 _ _ **Fuck it, close enough**__ _ _,__ _Al thought, Hypatia then saying the final word of the chant, the activating word. If Al understood this as well as he thought he did, they'd only have a second or two to do the next part. But they were all tired from fighting, and they thought they were getting like, adrenaline burnout or something, if that was possible._

 _Al felt Mother shove him aside as She took control._

 _"_ _ _Expecto Patronum__ _!" She shouted._

 _It felt like suddenly finding out he had been a water tower all his life, discovering this fact only by the feeling of suddenly being completely emptied, as literally_ _ _all__ _of their magic poured out of them, through the wand, and into the Patronus. The light from the Patronus was blinding; so blinding that all other spells stopped flying, because everyone was covering their eyes._

 _When the light dimmed a little, Al looked up and saw a remarkable sight. Mother's usual Patronus was a three-tailed fox, technically a kitsune. Her supercharged Patronus, however, was as big as Hagrid, humanoid, and was a_ _ _nine-tailed__ _kitsune. It looked human, aside from the nine tails and the fox ears, and it was completely nude, except for a quiver of arrows slung over its shoulder. It was also quite plainly a female, her breasts and... other bits... fully exposed._

 _As everyone gaped at it, the Patronus drew several arrows from her quiver and nocked one of them, the other two held in the same hand as she aimed for one of the Death Eaters. Al heard Voldemort and several other Death Eaters laugh, and he knew why; even he would have thought it absurd to summon a Patronus against mortal foes, before today. Even now, he wasn't sure this would work._

 _The Patronus loosed her arrow, and the laughing, masked Death Eater exploded into a cloud of red mist when the arrow hit him. There was a horrified silence for a moment as she nocked another arrow and took aim, which took only a second. Then there was screaming, as the Death Eaters ran as fast as they could, or tried to Apparate away, one of the latter ducking away just in time to keep his life but lose an arm. Even Voldemort was running away, leaving Bellatrix to save herself, but she was running in such a panic that she hadn't even noticed._

 _Another arrow missed its target entirely, and the stone angel it hit instead exploded, throwing small boulders and smaller rubble in every direction. Al and Cedric were only spared because one of the boulders bounced off the Patronus's knee. The Patronus barely noticed this, as she nocked another arrow._

 _But it was over, now; all the Death Eaters and Voldemort had vanished. The Patronus noticed this, too. She kept an arrow nocked for a little bit while she wandered around looking behind gravestones for stragglers. When she was certain they were all gone, she put the arrows back in her quiver and walked over to Al and Cedric, pausing on the way to pick up the Triwizard Cup and hold it over them, waiting for Al's signal._

 _"Cedric, you awake?" He said too loudly; he could barely hear himself speak even then, the ringing in his ears was so bad._

 _Cedric giggled with a faint note of hysteria. "Yes, Al, I'm awake. Don't think I didn't notice the glowing, 12-foot tall naked woman going around exploding Death Eaters with her arrows. Especially since I think I accidentally got a mouthful of that first bloke's brain."_

 _The Patronus was dimming rapidly, Al noticed, and wavering._

 _"Shut up and get ready to grab the Cup. No wait, grab me around the middle with one arm first, just in case. She's about to collapse, and I don't want to get knocked out before we go."_

 _"Alright, Al," Cedric said, still sounding a little hysterical. "I'm ready."_

 _Al checked, and nodded. The Patronus dropped the Cup, then she vanished completely. Al caught the Cup, and instantly he and Cedric were yanked away from the carnage and flying off to safety._

 _ **Endnotes**_ _: MWAH HA HA HA! I've been planning that surprise about their mother's sacrifice still being in effect since_ _ _before I finished their first year__ _! It's been so HARD keeping that a secret all this time, but now it's out! *Evil laughter* *Dances an excited jig around a bonfire while playing a pan pipe*_

 _Okay, now that I've celebrated, let me just say that the protection of their mother's blood still works because of their multiplicity; Adira (and the others, by extension) is protected (or was, before Voldy used their blood) because the Potters all have the same blood, and they each have their own soul, so even though it's all the same body, the fact they have multiple souls means that_ _ _ **anywhere**__ _ _they call home__ _is the "home where (their) mother's blood dwells." I thought of this halfway through finishing their first year, and it was just so good an idea I kept it under my hat all this time! *More evil laughter*_

 _(Despite having different souls, their having the same body and intertwined minds via the common memory means they're also tightly magically bound to one another. It might be possible for them to get their own bodies, but it would be very difficult. Would probably take a decade and tons of research into alchemy and so on, if it's even possible at all.)_

 _I've also been planning the supercharged Patronus for a while now, too. I'd guess about six months? My friend Andrea helped me think of it. :) As weird as the idea may sound, I do believe it's much more believable than the_ _ _deus ex machina__ _that was the_ _ _Priori Incantatem__ _effect in canon. By the way, just to stem the tide of questions a little until the next chapter is out, the supercharged Patronus comes with a price: they sacrificed_ _ _ **two months**__ _of magic to fuel it. They'll be out of commission, magic-wise, for most of the summer._

 _And yes, "nocked" and "nocking"_ _are_ _the correct spellings, in that context; I know, I checked._

 _The Mega-Patronus's technique of holding several arrows in the same hand as it nocked another arrow was a real technique back in the Middle Ages, that I first heard about on a YouTube video, by a man who had recreated the technique and related techniques and was demonstrating them. It's a pretty bad-ass video._

 _I've been worrying about this chapter so long, making so many changes in my notes, but finally it's done!_

 _By the way, that stuff about sacrificing other people's magic was supposed to be a setup for this chapter, but I changed my mind. I might see if I can use it later. Not sure when, if ever. But I did realize some of the ritual magic was overpowered, and I've been working to fetter it since then._

 _Lastly, I fully admit to lifting Chandra's new "associating wand spells with music notes" technique from "The Long Game" by inwardtransience. But he'd already been doing some spells with music long before I read that story, and the idea fit so well I couldn't resist. In "The Long Game," it's Luna who was using that technique. I may have them teach Luna the technique in this story. :)_

 _That's all for now._


	42. Victory and Defeat

"The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 42"

By = Fayanora

Chapter Forty-two: Victory and Defeat

Note 1: Text in 'Italics and British quotes' is Parseltongue.

Note 2: Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much. There's a lot of those in this one, but don't skim through or you'll miss things.

Note 3: Bloody formatting keeps getting messed up, I'm trying it with the formatting stripped, see if that improves anything.

Note 4: All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!

*FAYANORA*

Al felt Cedric and himself slam into the ground; his face was pressed into grass; the smell of it filled his nostrils. He had closed his eyes while the Portkey transported him, and he kept them closed now. He did not move. All the breath seemed to have been knocked out of him; his head was swimming so badly he felt as though the ground beneath him were swaying like the deck of a ship, his ears were still ringing, and he had a head injury for sure. To hold himself steady, he tightened his hold on the two things he was still clutching: the smooth, cold handle of the Tri-wizard Cup and Cedric's hand. He felt as though he would slide away into the blackness gathering at the edges of his brain if he let go of either of them. Shock and exhaustion kept him on the ground, breathing in the smell of the grass, waiting … waiting for someone to do something … something to happen … and all the while, his scar burned dully on his forehead.

Cedric forced his hand out of Al's hand, but Al just stayed where he was. A torrent of sound deafened and confused him; there were voices everywhere, footsteps, shouting. … He remained where he was, his face screwed up against the noise, as though it were a nightmare that would pass.

Then a pair of hands seized him roughly and turned him over.

"Alastair! Alastair!"

He opened his eyes.

He was looking up at the starry sky, and Albus Dumbledore was crouched over him. Cedric was next to Dumbledore, being helped up by Sirius. The dark shadows of a crowd of people pressed in around them, pushing nearer; Al felt the ground beneath his head reverberating with their footsteps.

They had come back to the edge of the maze. He could see the stands rising above him, the shapes of people moving in them, the stars above.

"He's back," Al whispered. "He's back. Voldemort is back."

"I know, Alastair; Cedric told me."

"What's going on? What's happened?"

The face of Cornelius Fudge appeared upside down over Al; it looked nervous.

"Voldemort has returned, Cornelius. Alastair and Cedric both witnessed his return."

"He's back? What's this rubbish? How could they have seen...? They were in the maze, Dumbledore!"

"The Triwizard Cup was a Portkey, Minister," Cedric said. "Al tried warning me before we grabbed it, tried stopping me so I'd be safe. But I didn't listen. If Al hadn't turned me into a mouse the second we arrived in that graveyard, I'd probably be dead!"

Cornelius spluttered, confused.

"Dumbledore," Al said before the minister could say anything, "where's Moody? He's an impostor, and he has Luna somewhere! He said she'd be safe if I went to the graveyard to face Voldemort, but I don't trust him. Where's Luna? Iliana is freaking out right now, she needs to know where Luna is!"

(Wait a minute, didn't we have the Map on us? He never took it away; I don't think he knew about it.)

At Hypatia's words, Al fumbled around in his robes and found the Marauder's Map, and he tried activating it right in front of Dumbledore and the Minister of Magic, but nothing happened. Of course nothing happened; he'd sacrificed two months of his magic!

Sirius, seeing what he was doing, put his wand to the Map, activated it, and said, "Find Luna Lovegood."

Concentric circles surrounded her spot on the Map.

"Great," Sirius said, "that means she's alive. And she's in that secret passage behind the mirror on the fourth floor."

"I thought that caved in?" Al said, hysteria creeping into his voice.

"A skilled enough wizard could clear enough of the rubble to put a prisoner there," Sirius said. "Wouldn't even take much skill, really. A student could do it."

Before Al could say anything, Sirius next asked the Map to find Alastor Moody.

"He'll be in his office, I expect," Al said. "Moody was an impostor. Look for Barty Crouch instead."

"Barty- Crouch, you say?" exclaimed the minister. "Bartemius Crouch? You dare accuse him of being a Death Eater, when he's proven over years-"

"Minister," Dumbledore said, "Mr. Crouch had a son, did he not? With the same name, even?"

"What? Well, yes, but he died in Azkaban, years ago!"

"I rather suspect that if you dig up that grave, whoever is in there will not be Barty Crouch Junior."

Fudge spluttered some more, looking lost for words.

Sirius, on the other hand, looked for Barty Crouch on the Map. The Map showed the man moving away from their location and toward the gates of the school.

"Sirius!" Dumbledore exclaimed.

"On it!" Sirius answered, turning into Padfoot and running off after the impostor.

Fudge gaped at Barty Crouch's spot on the Map. "What is this thing? How are you able to have a map of an Unplottable school?"

"I don't know how it works," Al said.

"I could explain it, Minister," Remus said. "It's a long explanation, but suffice it to say for now that the Map is tied into the school's wards, using their information to populate its display. So it's never wrong. But we never did figure out how to get Junior, Senior, or other such things to display on the Map."

Fudge goggled at Remus. "You realize I'll have to have more evidence of that statement than the word of a werewolf, Mr. Lupin?"

Lupin smiled. "Sirius will be able to confirm what I've said. He's the only living person left besides myself who could tell you how it works."

Fudge still looked skeptical. After all, exonerated or not, Sirius had once escaped from Azkaban.

Al looked over at Cedric to see how he was doing, and saw that his parents were hugging him, looking relieved to see he was alive.

Dumbledore – finally noticing Al was still on the ground – bent down, and with extraordinary strength for a man so old and thin, raised him from the ground and set him on his feet. Al swayed. His head was pounding, his ears were still ringing, and one side of his head was caked in drying blood.

Noticing Al's wounds himself, Fudge said, "He looks like he should go to the Hospital Wing, Dumbledore; he's injured. Diggory, too."

"Not just yet, Minister. Their wounds are not serious, I think, and I'd prefer to ease Mr. Potter's mind in regard to Miss Lovegood first. Remus, you should go find her."

"Right away, sir," Remus said, running off.

"While we wait for Sirius and Remus, Al, I think we should go to my office so you can tell me more of what happened. Cedric, if you could come as well, you're the only other witness we have."

"Yes, yes," Fudge said. "That sounds a good idea, let's hear their story. I'd like to know what they think happened before they have a chance to get their stories straight with each other. If they haven't already, that is."

Ignoring Fudge, Dumbledore escorted Al, Cedric, and the Diggory parents toward his office. A load of other people tried crowding them as they left, though, and Mr. Diggory volunteered to keep them at bay. Dumbledore thanked him and guided them on toward the school.

They were almost to the door of the castle when Sirius came running back up to Dumbledore, looking the worse for wear, Hagrid coming up behind him. Sirius's robes were smoking like he'd been on fire, his face was battered, and his hair was also singed. One arm had a bleeding cut on it.

"What happened, Sirius? Did you catch him?"

"No, more's the pity. That bugger can duel better than anyone I've seen besides the real Moody and yourself. Hagrid here saw most of it on his way to help me, but the bugger got away before he was in range to do anything to help."

"Aye, Dumbledore," Hagrid said. "I reckon it'll take an hour or so to fix the damage. Twere a short fight, but an awful nasty one fer all tha'."

"I don't know how he got so good," Sirius complained. "I know I'm rusty, but ye gods, I have been getting enough practice to where I should've done better than that."

"And what did he look like? Did he look like Alastor Moody?" Dumbledore asked.

"Nope. Polyjuice must've worn off. He probably let it wear off in case he needed to make a quick escape; Moody isn't exactly very quick on his feet anymore. Anyway, the man I saw looks different, older, but it was Crouch Junior alright. I remember what he looked like from my time in Azkaban."

Fudge tapped Sirius on the shoulder and the two of them fell back to talk, trailing behind the rest of them. Al heard enough snatches of conversation to know Sirius was explaining the Marauder's Map in detail to Fudge.

Professor Snape turned up as they were entering the school.

"Headmaster, I have something urgent I need to tell you," Snape said. "Something private."

"I believe I know what you are going to say, Severus. It can wait. For now, Voldemort is back in a new body, alive and dangerous as ever. Young Mr. Potter and young Mr. Diggory here are witnesses."

Snape nodded, scowling at Al. "May I join you, Headmaster? I wish to know how Mr. Potter managed to get in trouble this time, when he was supposed to be in that maze. I have a bet with Minerva about it, and I wish to know if I've won."

"You may come, Severus, if you can keep your snide comments to yourself for now."

Snape nodded again, and fell in behind them, Sirius glaring at him now and then all the way to the gargoyle outside Dumbledore's office.

"You're not going to interrogate Al, are you, Dumbledore?" Sirius asked. "He's just been through a huge ordeal."

"We must know the full story as soon as possible. The faster we know, the faster we can act."

Sirius sighed, and nodded.

When they reached the stone gargoyle and finished speaking, Dumbledore gave the password, and it sprang aside.

"If you don't mind, Dumbledore," Fudge said, "I'm going to interrogate Diggory separately, to see if their stories match up. I'll expect you to fill me in, of course, on Potter's version."

"Of course, Minister. Severus, if you could join the Minister to ensure everything is right and proper, I will fill you in later as well."

Snape scowled, but nodded, and the two of them went somewhere else. Hagrid stayed behind as well, not wanting to crowd the office. The rest of them – Sirius, Dumbledore, and Al – went up the moving spiral staircase to the door of Dumbledore's office.

They entered Dumbledore's office. Dumbledore made sure they all had enough chairs. Al sat down on the nearest one, a kind of numbness and a sense of complete unreality were upon him, but he did not care; he was even glad of it. He didn't want to have to think about anything that had happened since he had first touched the Triwizard Cup. He didn't want to have to examine the memories, fresh and sharp as photographs, which kept flashing across his mind. Mad-Eye Moody, inside the trunk. The fake Moody pointing a wand at him. Bellatrix cutting off her hand and the rest of her arm. Voldemort, rising from the steaming cauldron.

When Al sat down, Fawkes the phoenix fluttered over to him and landed at his side.

" 'Lo, Fawkes," said Al quietly. He stroked the phoenix's beautiful scarlet-and-gold plumage. Fawkes blinked peacefully up at him. There was something comforting about his warm weight.

Dumbledore stopped talking. He sat down opposite Al, behind his desk. He was looking at Al, who avoided his eyes. Dumbledore was going to question him. He was going to make Al relive everything.

They were interrupted before they could even begin when Remus and Luna came in. Luna looked scared and confused, but unharmed. Al ran over to her, hugging her.

"Hello to you too, Al," she said, her fear turning to amusement. "Or is that Iliana?"

"It's all of us. Iliana is your girlfriend, but the rest of us are your friends; we all worried about you."

"I'd like to say I worried about you as well, but by the time Mr. Lupin woke me up, it was all over. But now I see you're wounded, so I suppose that means I can worry. Is your ear missing?"

"I think so. I hope Madam Pomfrey can fix it."

She blinked at him. "Won't it fix itself when you transform again?"

Al sighed. "I suppose it will, in two months when I get my magic back."

There were a number of shocked noises and voices about this pronouncement.

"What do you mean by that, Al?" Sirius asked. "Why would your magic be gone?"

"Yes, what happened? It sounds serious," Remus said.

"It's a long story, everyone. Please try to be patient with me."

Al sighed deeply. They might as well get it over with. He began, then, to tell them everything, as he spoke, visions of everything that had passed that night seemed to rise before his eyes; he saw the sparkling surface of the potion that had revived Voldemort; he saw the Death Eaters Apparating between the graves around them; he saw the furious, pitched battle as Hypatia prepared her ritual; he saw Mother's supercharged Patronus killing that Death Eater and maiming another.

Once or twice, Sirius made a noise as though about to say something, his hand still tight on Al's shoulder, but Dumbledore raised his hand to stop him, and Al was glad of this, because it was easier to keep going now he had started. It was even a relief; he felt almost as though something poisonous were being extracted from him. It was costing him every bit of determination he had to keep talking, yet he sensed that once he had finished, he would feel better. He also had help from the others in his head with him, who would take over when he stopped for whatever reason.

Luna, Sirius and the others gasped when he revealed Bellatrix LeStrange was alive, and had helped Voldemort tonight. Several people gaped in astonishment that the power of his mother's protection hadn't broken like they'd all thought it had when he'd stopped staying with the Dursleys. Al himself was surprised at a detail he'd barely noticed before, but which Hypatia had recorded, about Voldemort giving Bellatrix a super-strong silver arm to replace the one she'd lost. And when he told of her stabbing him in the arm and later using the blood in the ritual to revive Voldemort, Sirius let out a vehement exclamation, Luna squeaked loudly in alarm, and Dumbledore stood up so quickly that Al started. Dumbledore walked around the desk and told Al to stretch out his arm. Al showed them all the place where his robes were torn and the cut beneath them.

"He said my blood would make him stronger than if he'd used someone else's," Al said. "Not sure why he thought that, since he hadn't known Mum's protection was still going, but maybe it was something symbolic for him. But once he knew, he said the protection my — my mother left in me — he'd have it too. And he was right — he could touch me without hurting himself, he touched my face. Even though I'd burned Bellatrix's arm nearly all the way off just minutes before."

For a fleeting instant, Al and the others thought they saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore's eyes. But next second, they were sure they had imagined it, for when Dumbledore had returned to his seat behind the desk, he looked as old and weary as they had ever seen him. Hypatia wondered to the others if it had something to do with the horcruxes.

"Very well," Dumbledore said, sitting down again. "Voldemort has overcome that particular barrier. Please continue, Alastair."

Al went on; he explained how Voldemort had emerged from the cauldron, and told them all Hypatia's recording could remember of Voldemort's speech to the Death Eaters, pausing a moment as he looked at Luna before deciding he could trust her and continuing, explaining the part where they'd been largely spacing out the man's incessant nattering while a non-sentient construct of Hypatia's had been dutifully recording everything. He paused briefly to explain Hypatia to Luna, and swear her to secrecy about the subject, before going on. Then he told how Voldemort had untied him, returned his wand to him, intending for them to duel. He explained about the diversion Cedric supplied, the pitched battle they'd barely survived as Hypatia prepared the ritual, and all about the supercharged Patronus and the mayhem it caused, scattering the surviving Death Eaters to the wind. And then, of course, how the Patronus had dropped the Portkey into Al's arms so they could escape.

"That's a Hell of a night you had, pup," Sirius said when he was finished.

Al suddenly became aware that Fawkes was moving. It was resting its beautiful head against Al's arm and thick, pearly tears were falling from its eyes onto the wound. The pain vanished. The skin mended.

Dumbledore looked at Al with approval. "Alastair, you and the others in your collective have shown bravery beyond anything I could have expected of you tonight. You have shown bravery equal to those who died fighting Voldemort at the height of his powers. You have shouldered a grown wizard's burden and found yourself equal to it — and you have now given us all that we have a right to expect. You will come with me to the hospital wing. I do not want you returning to the dormitory tonight. A Sleeping Potion, and some peace … Sirius, would you like to stay with him? And you, Remus? Miss Lovegood?"

Sirius nodded and stood up. Remus joined him, as did Luna. The five of them went downstairs and on to the hospital wing.

When Dumbledore pushed open the door, Al saw Mrs. Weasley, Bill, Ron, and Hermione grouped around a harassed-looking Madam Pomfrey. They had apparently come to watch the Third Task too, and now appeared to be demanding to know where Al was and what had happened to him. All of them whipped around as Al, Dumbledore, Sirius, Remus, and Luna entered, and Mrs. Weasley let out a kind of muffled scream at the sight of Al's head.

"Adira! Er, Alastair! You look horrible!" she said, clearly worried.

She started to hurry toward him, but Dumbledore moved between them.

"Molly," he said, holding up a hand, "please listen to me for a moment. Alastair has been through a terrible ordeal tonight. He has just had to relive it for me. What he needs now is sleep, and peace, and quiet. If he would like you all to stay with him," he added, looking around at Ron, Hermione, Luna, Sirius, Remus, and Bill too, "you may do so. But I do not want you questioning him until he is ready to answer, and certainly not this evening."

Mrs. Weasley nodded. She was very white. She rounded on Ron, Hermione, and Bill as though they were being noisy, and hissed, "Did you hear? He needs quiet!"

"Headmaster," said Madam Pomfrey, "this is far too many people to be visiting a patient at one time. I already have Mr. and Mrs. Diggory here with their son. Some of these people will have to leave."

"I'll go," Remus said. "Are any other volunteers?"

"I'll go too," Bill said.

"At least one more will have to go, I must insist on it, Headmaster."

Mrs. Weasley looked at the others, then sighed. "I'll go too, much as I don't want to. Alastair will have his godfather, and I can't say no to poor dear Luna. Ron, you and Hermione should come as well."

There was an instant outcry about this from the two of them, and Mrs. Weasley argued for a bit and then threw up her hands, leaving Madam Pomfrey to sort it out, exiting the room muttering.

Al felt an inexpressible sense of gratitude to Dumbledore for asking the others not to question him. It wasn't as though he didn't want them there; but the thought of explaining it all over again, the idea of reliving it one more time, was more than he could stand.

"I can save some space, Poppy, by turning into Padfoot. My dog form," he explained at her confused expression.

"I suppose so," she said.

Sirius nodded and shrunk a little into the very large dog that was Padfoot. He jumped up on Al's bed and curled up at Al's feet.

"I will be back to see you as soon as I have met with Fudge, Alastair," said Dumbledore. "I would like you to remain here tomorrow until I have spoken to the school." He left.

As Madam Pomfrey led Al to a nearby bed, he caught sight of the real Moody lying motionless in a bed at the far end of the room. His wooden leg and magical eye were lying on the bedside table.

"Is he okay?" Al asked.

"He'll be fine," said Madam Pomfrey. "It's you I'm worried about. This is a nasty cut on your head, and there's possible head trauma I'll have to fix before you can go to sleep. As well as that missing ear to regrow, if possible."

"And Cedric?"

"She's keeping me overnight for observation, just in case," Cedric said. "That was a nasty fight we were in. It's a miracle we survived."

"Right," Al said, waiting as she tended to him.

"Hmm," she said after a bit. "This is odd."

"What's- oh wait, I think I know what's odd, Madam Pomfrey. I, uh... it's a long story, but suffice it to say I won't be able to do a lick of magic for the next two months."

"I... see," she said, her eyes narrowed at him. "Well that does explain these readings, I suppose. I'll heal you up, then. Good to know, though; some potions use a person's magic to fully work, but we shouldn't need any of those."

She finished healing his wounds, including the head trauma and regrowing the missing ear since it hadn't been removed by dark magic, and soon he was getting into some pajamas and taking a potion for dreamless sleep. Al took the goblet and drank a few mouthfuls. He felt himself becoming drowsy at once. Everything around him became hazy; the lamps around the hospital wing seemed to be winking at him in a friendly way through the screen around his bed; his body felt as though it was sinking deeper into the warmth of the feather mattress. Before he could finish the potion, before he could say another word, his exhaustion had carried him off to sleep.

Al woke up, so warm, so very sleepy, that he didn't open his eyes, wanting to drop off again. The room was still dimly lit; he was sure it was still nighttime and had a feeling that he couldn't have been asleep very long. He felt Sirius still curled up at his feet. He also felt Luna laying in the bed beside him, but she was above the covers and he was under them.

Then he heard whispering around him.

"They'll wake him if they don't shut up!"

"What are they shouting about? Nothing else can have happened, can it?"

Al opened his eyes blearily. He could see Mr. and Mrs. Diggory close by, Cedric's bed being next to his own. Mr. Diggory was on his feet. The real Moody was still asleep in a bed on one side of him.

"That's Fudge's voice," he whispered. "And that's Minerva McGonagall's, isn't it? But what are they arguing about?"

Now Al and the others could hear them too: people shouting and running toward the hospital wing.

"Absolutely not!" yelled an irate Fudge. "I will not waste valuable Ministry time and resources on a wild diricawl hunt! You have no evidence!"

"We have two eyewitnesses to his return, Minister! And two eyewitnesses to Crouch Junior being alive still!"

"HA!" Fudge shouted derisively. "The word of a fourteen-year-old lunatic and the victim of a Confundus Charm! That is as good as no evidence! And as to Black and Hagrid, that's just as bad! Hagrid is a continual trouble-maker who shouldn't even be a teacher because of his monster fancy and his halfbreed status, and Black was an illegal animagus who escaped from prison! The fact he was innocent of being a Death Eater and killing those Muggles means nothing! He's still in Dumbledore's pocket! Without Dumbledore, Black would have been Kissed!"

Al heard the hospital doors burst open. Unnoticed by any of the people around his bed, all of whom were staring at the door as Fudge barged in, Al sat up and glared in Fudge's general direction. Sirius was awake too; he leaped off the bed and transformed back into his human form. He saw Al was awake and pulled the screens back so Al could see. Luna was awake as well, sitting on the side of his bed, watching everything placidly, as thought it were a television drama.

Fudge came striding up the ward. Professors McGonagall and Snape were at his heels.

"Where's Dumbledore?" Fudge demanded of Sirius.

"He's not here," said Sirius angrily. "This is a hospital wing, Minister, don't you think you'd do better to —"

But the door opened, and Dumbledore came sweeping up the ward.

"What has happened?" said Dumbledore sharply, looking from Fudge to Professor McGonagall. "Why are you disturbing these people?"

"The Minister refuses to deploy resources to deal with the You-Know-Who crisis, nor to look for Crouch Junior," McGonagall said. "He seems to think the whole thing is some kind of mad conspiracy against him, says we have no real evidence, and you're vying for the position of Minister."

Dumbledore regarded Fudge coolly. "Minister, I have never wanted your position. If I had, I could easily have obtained it after Minister Bagnold retired. We have no reason to lie about these things. Voldemort is back, and we have two eyewitnesses to his return, in Mr. Potter and young Mr. Diggory."

"You believe their mad tale, do you?"

"It is not a mad tale, Minister. It makes sense. It explains most if not all of the unusual occurrences of the last year, including the problem with the Tournament. And anyway, did you not interrogate Mr. Diggory yourself, to make sure the stories matched up?"

Fudge snorted derisively. "All that proves is Potter planted the mad story in Diggory's head before their sudden appearance from the Maze. And this tosh about the TriWizard cup being a Portkey, there's no evidence of that! And by Diggory's own admission, he and Potter fought on several occasions within the Maze. You'd have me believe one of the voices in Potter's head has been practicing illegal ritual magic with your knowledge and that it saved them in a fight against You-Know-Who? And that it was done with a giant humanoid Patronus that can kill people? Tosh and nonsense! I've never heard such a ridiculous yarn in my life! If it was a novel in a library I'd throw it across the room for being too absurd even for fiction!

"So no, Dumbledore, I don't believe it for a minute. It's a much more believable story that Potter, who is clearly insane, planted the tale in Diggory's brain for some reason and you're either feeble-minded enough in your old age to believe it, or you're pretending to believe it in a bid to remove me from power!"

By now, Al noticed Cedric had woken up too, and was glaring at the Minister as well. His parents hadn't noticed yet. Mr. Diggory was glowering at Fudge.

"Are you calling my son a liar?"

Fudge was about to respond, but Dumbledore spoke first, interrupting him.

"Minister," Dumbledore said. "We do have evidence. The eyewitnesses – including the two who saw Barty Crouch Junior – can give Pensieve memories as evidence."

"Memories can be altered, Dumbledore!"

"Yes, but it takes a ridiculously talented Occlumens to alter such memories without leaving traces of the changes."

"Indeed. And I've been interrogating a lot of people today, Dumbledore, so I happen to know one of the voices in Potter's head has precisely the talent needed to do that. And that it may be a Legilimens as well, by now. So you'll excuse me if I don't trust all these testimonies."

"What of Hagrid and Black, Minister?" Snape interjected, glaring, getting a matching glare from Sirius. "Much as I hate to admit it, they saw Crouch Junior. I have viewed their memories of the fight with Crouch, and I believe them to be genuine."

Fudge scoffed again. "You could have planted those yourself, Snape."

"Like I'd let that bastard fiddle around inside my head!" Sirius barked.

Snape raised an eyebrow. "You were with me, Minister, when Black and Hagrid returned from their fight. You heard them speak of it. Please, tell me how I could be in two places at once?"

Fudge faltered at this a little. "Well, well... I may not have all the details worked out yet, Snape, but trust me when I say I will work it out in the end!"

"Cornelius, when Alastair Potter and Cedric Diggory touched the Triwizard Cup tonight, they were transported straight to Voldemort," said Dumbledore steadily. "They witnessed Lord Voldemort's rebirth. You heard Cedric's testimony. But I will explain it all to you again if you will step up to my office."

Dumbledore glanced around at Al and saw that he was awake, but shook his head and said, "I am afraid I cannot permit you to question Al tonight."

"Mighty convenient, Dumbledore. But unnecessary. Nothing he says would convince me anyway, he's a lunatic."

That was the final straw for Al, and he decided to speak up at last, speaking over Sirius.

"I admit my situation is peculiar, Minister, but Rita Skeeter's lies aside, I assure you I'm quite sane."

Fudge snorted again and rolled his eyes. "'Lies.' Right. I've seen you transform. I've seen your different behaviors in these different masks. I don't need Rita Skeeter to convince me you're insane."

"Then answer me this: why would I act against you? I neither know you well enough to have any reason to be against you, nor do I care. I don't really trust Dumbledore either, to be honest; he's lied to me on more than one occasion, even if he did eventually come clean. If I gave a single god-damn who was Minister, I certainly wouldn't support Dumbledore over you. Dunno who I'd support, honestly, that's how little I care." He then turned to Sirius, thinking for a second before adding, "Possibly Sirius. But not Dumbledore."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, pup, but I wouldn't want the position either. Too stressful."

Fudge shrugged. "Who knows what motivates a lunatic? And the fact you speak with snakes doesn't help your case either."

Al closed his eyes and took a bracing breath. "You want evidence my story is true? Ask Madam Pomfrey. She'll be able to confirm that my magic is currently not functioning. For the next two months, Minister, I am as powerless as a Muggle or a squib."

"I don't have an explanation for that either, Potter, but it's still absurd to believe a fourteen-year-old wizard managed to advance that far into ritual magic on their own."

"Hermione Granger has been top in our year, possibly the entire school, since our first year. She's maybe half as intelligent as Hypatia, and if she'd had access to the same books Hypatia did, she could have possibly done the same thing."

Hermione blinked. "Who's Hypatia?"

"I'll tell you later, Hermione. It's uh... a bit of a secret, actually. For now."

"I won't tell anyone," Cedric said. "If she's the one who saved our asses in that graveyard, I'll keep the secret of her existence for you. Assuming it doesn't get out anyway," he added, glaring at Fudge with distrust.

"What of you two?" Al asked the Diggories.

They nodded. "We have no idea what you're even talking about," Mr. Diggory said, "but yes, we'll keep quiet."

"Loathe as I am to agree with Mr. Potter on anything, Minister, he isn't wrong about this 'Hypatia' being that intelligent. I've gotten to know her over many weeks, and if her talents were not so focused on runic magic, arithmancy, and ritual magic to the exclusion of all else, she could have grown to become the next Dumbledore. Perhaps even better than that. The girl can, after all, do ridiculously complicated arithmancy in her head. Just ask Fangslaughter and his partner down at Gringott's."

"This is absurd!" Fudge shouted. "The boy's brains are clearly addled, anyone can see that! On top of which, he's a Parselmouth and having funny turns around the place!"

"I assume that you are referring to the pains the Potters have been experiencing in their scar?" said Dumbledore coolly.

"You admit that he has been having these pains, then?" said Fudge quickly. "Headaches? Nightmares? Possibly — hallucinations?"

"Listen to me, Cornelius," said Dumbledore, taking a step toward Fudge, and once again, he seemed to radiate an indefinable sense of power. "The Potters are as sane as you or I, just different. That scar upon their forehead has not addled their brains. I believe it hurts them when Lord Voldemort is close by, or feeling particularly murderous."

Fudge had taken half a step back from Dumbledore, but he looked no less stubborn.

"You'll forgive me, Dumbledore, but I've never heard of a curse scar acting as an alarm bell before."

"Look, we saw Voldemort come back!" Al shouted. He tried to get out of bed again, but Sirius forced him back. "I saw the Death Eaters! I can give you their names! Lucius Malfoy —"

Snape made a sudden movement, but as Al looked at him, Snape's eyes flew back to Fudge.

"Malfoy was cleared!" said Fudge, visibly affronted. "A very old family — donations to excellent causes —"

"Macnair!" Al continued.

"Also cleared! Now working for the Ministry!"

"Avery — Nott — Crabbe — Goyle —"

"You are merely repeating the names of those who were acquitted of being Death Eaters thirteen years ago!" said Fudge angrily. "You could have found those names in old reports of the trials! For heaven's sake, Dumbledore, the boy can talk to snakes, and you still think he's trustworthy?"

"What about me, Minister?" Cedric asked.

"Confunded!"

"NO! I was there! I was a mouse for most of it, but I was there! I could see and hear just fine. How could a Confundus make me think I was a mouse? How would Al even know what it felt like to be a mouse?"

"I don't know, but I know enough to see through this pathetic attempt to fool me! It seems to me that you are all determined to start a panic that will destabilize everything we have worked for these last thirteen years!"

Al couldn't believe what he was hearing. He had always thought of Fudge as a kindly figure, a little blustering, a little pompous, but essentially good-natured. But now a short, angry wizard stood before him, refusing, point-blank, to accept the prospect of disruption in his comfortable and ordered world — to believe that Voldemort could have risen.

"Again I ask, are you calling my son a liar?" Mr. Diggory demanded.

"No, Diggory. Like I said, he was clearly Confunded."

"He says he wasn't, though!" Mr. Diggory said, but he looked uncertain.

"Why don't we have Madam Pomfrey verify that, then?" Sirius responded.

"As if she's not in his pocket, too."

"A Saint Mungo's Healer, then?" Mr. Diggory asked.

Fudge snorted, and turned away from Mr. Diggory.

"Voldemort has returned," Dumbledore repeated. "If you accept that fact straightaway, Fudge, and take the necessary measures, we may still be able to save the situation. The first and most essential step is to remove Azkaban from the control of the dementors —"

"Preposterous!" shouted Fudge again. "Remove the dementors? I'd be kicked out of office for suggesting it! Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the dementors are standing guard at Azkaban!"

"The rest of us sleep less soundly in our beds, Cornelius, knowing that you have put Lord Voldemort's most dangerous supporters in the care of creatures who will join him the instant he asks them!" said Dumbledore. "They will not remain loyal to you, Fudge! Voldemort can offer them much more scope for their powers and their pleasures than you can! With the dementors behind him, and his old supporters returned to him, you will be hard-pressed to stop him regaining the sort of power he had thirteen years ago!"

Al sighed and glared at Fudge as Dumbledore told Fudge to send envoys to the giants, berated Fudge for being too too fond of his power to pull his head out of his arse and see the reality of the situation, warning Fudge he'd be remembered poorly by history if he didn't act on Dumbledore's advice. But it was all falling on deaf ears. Fudge had made up his mind, and couldn't stand to be confused by the facts. Finally, even Dumbledore had enough of arguing with the pompous windbag.

"If your determination to shut your eyes will carry you as far as this, Cornelius," said Dumbledore, "we have reached a parting of the ways. You must act as you see fit. And I — I shall act as I see fit."

Dumbledore's voice carried no hint of a threat; it sounded like a mere statement, but Fudge bristled as though Dumbledore were advancing upon him with a wand.

"Now, see here, Dumbledore," he said, waving a threatening finger. "I've given you free rein, always. I've had a lot of respect for you. I might not have agreed with some of your decisions, but I've kept quiet. There aren't many who'd have let you hire werewolves, or keep Hagrid, or decide what to teach your students without reference to the Ministry. But if you're going to work against me —"

"The only one against whom I intend to work," said Dumbledore, "is Lord Voldemort. If you are against him, then we remain, Cornelius, on the same side."

It seemed Fudge could think of no answer to this. Instead, he glared at Dumbledore. "You're trying to convince me to believe an impossibility, Dumbledore. You should quit while you're behind."

Snape strode forward, past Dumbledore, pulling up the left sleeve of his robes as he went. He stuck out his forearm and showed it to Fudge, who recoiled.

"There," said Snape harshly. "There. The Dark Mark. It is not as clear as it was an hour or so ago, when it burned black, but you can still see it. Every Death Eater had the sign burned into him by the Dark Lord. It was a means of distinguishing one another, and his means of summoning us to him. When he touched the Mark of any Death Eater, we were to Disapparate, and Apparate, instantly, at his side. This Mark has been growing clearer all year. Karkaroff's too. Why do you think Karkaroff fled tonight? We both felt the Mark burn. We both knew he had returned. Karkaroff fears the Dark Lord's vengeance. He betrayed too many of his fellow Death Eaters to be sure of a welcome back into the fold."

Fudge stepped back from Snape too. He was shaking his head. He did not seem to have taken in a word Snape had said. He stared, apparently repelled by the ugly mark on Snape's arm, then looked up at Dumbledore and whispered, "I don't know what you and your staff are playing at, Dumbledore, but I have heard enough. I have no more to add. I will be in touch with you tomorrow, Dumbledore, to discuss the running of this school. I must return to the Ministry."

He had almost reached the door when he paused. He turned around, strode back down the dormitory, and stopped at Al's bed.

"Your winnings," he said shortly, taking a large bag of gold out of his pocket and dropping it onto Al's bedside table. "Five hundred Galleons. And here's your half, Diggory," he said, throwing another bag on Cedric's bed. "Same amount. There should have been a presentation ceremony, but under the circumstances..."

He crammed his bowler hat onto his head and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The moment he had disappeared, Dumbledore turned to look at the group around Al's bed. Al placed the bag of gold on his bedside cabinet.

"There is work to be done," he said. "Amos, do I have your support?"

Mr. Diggory nodded. "Yes. Fudge called my son a liar, and he's using my son as part of some mad conspiracy theory about a cabal acting against him, when he should be preparing to fight You-Know-Who! Of course you have my support!"

"Excellent. Then please go to Molly Weasley, and ask her if I can count on her family's support. If she says yes, go to Arthur Weasley and tell him what has happened, leaving out the secret of Hypatia's existence. Arthur will need to be discreet, however. If Fudge thinks I am interfering at the Ministry..."

"Right, Dumbledore," Mr. Diggory said. "Once more, no idea what you're talking about, in regard to this 'Hypatia.' Don't think I want to know, either. Should I go now, then?"

"Yes, please."

Mr. Diggory nodded, hugged his wife and his son, then left to find Mrs. Weasley.

"Sirius, do I have your support as well?"

"Of course, Dumbledore. As long as Al and the others are on your side, so am I."

"And Alastair? You are on my side still?"

"Our objectives still align, yes," Al said.

"Excellent. So, Sirius, if you could go find Remus and send him to my office, I would be much obliged. I have a summer assignment for him. And after that, please go inform Arabella Figg and Mundungus Fletcher, and the rest of the old crowd."

"Right," Sirius said. He turned to Al. "I'll be back soon as I can, pup. You get better."

"Alright, Sirius. Go do what you need to do. We'll be fine. Madam Pomfrey is here."

Sirius took off then, Al watching him going.

"Oh yes," Dumbledore said. "And that reminds me, Alastair, you shall need a bodyguard until you are safely at home with Sirius. And one for the interim, until Sirius returns."

"I pick Professor Snape, if that's an option," Al said. "He's got plenty of reason to want me alive."

Snape glared angrily at Al. But Dumbledore shook his head. "Professor Snape has a greater mission, Alastair. Professor McGonagall shall stay behind to guard you."

She nodded, putting her hand on her wand but didn't take it out.

Dumbledore nodded and sent a Patronus message off. "Just informing Hagrid to come to my office," he said. "Hopefully he will be able to bring Madame Maxime with him as instructed."

He then turned to Snape. "You know what you must do, Severus. If you are ready... if you are prepared..."

Snape nodded. "I am."

He looked slightly paler than usual, and his cold, black eyes glittered strangely.

"Then good luck," said Dumbledore, and he watched, with a trace of apprehension on his face, as Snape swept wordlessly after Sirius, his robes billowing behind him.

"He's our spy, right?" Al asked.

"Indeed he is."

Al nodded. He knew Snape was getting revenge for Lily dying. That was solid enough motive for Al.

It was several minutes before Dumbledore spoke again.

"I must go to my office," Dumbledore said. "Take the rest of your potion, Alastair. I will see all of you later."

Al slumped back against his pillows as Dumbledore disappeared. Hermione, Ron, and Luna were all looking at him. None of them spoke for a very long time.

"You should take the rest of your potion, Al," Luna said at last. Her hand nudged the sack of gold on his bedside cabinet as she reached for the bottle and the goblet. "You have a good long sleep. Try and think about something else for a while. Think about what you're going to buy with your winnings."

"I don't want that gold. I never did. You want it, Cedric?"

Cedric shook his head. "No, we both won. Regardless of what happened next, we both touched the cup at the same time, it was a tie. That money is yours."

Al shrugged. "Fine, whatever," he said.

He was starting to feel the weight of the night's experiences weighing down on them. They tried pushing the thoughts away, but they kept resurfacing. It was finally happening. They hadn't found any of the horcruxes yet, hadn't figured out a way to remove the horcrux from their own flesh, and who knew how long it would take Moldyshorts to get his army back up to snuff? They were running out of time.

Al felt a warm hand on his, and saw it was Luna's hand, holding his tight. He then felt himself sink below the surface of their mind, Iliana taking over.

"Luna," she said with Al's voice. "God, that's weird. I took this whole transformation thing for granted, but it sure is weird when we're stuck in one form, the way Muggle Multiples are."

"Iliana?" Luna asked.

"Yes, it's me. Man, I can't wait until we get our magic back."

"Oh, you'll manage," Luna said.

"What about you, though?"

"I'll be fine. I know you're in there. Even if I can't see you or feel you, I know you're there. That's enough for me, until you get better."

"What if I never get better, though? What if this is permanent? I mean, even if we get our magic back, what if we lose our transformation power?"

"You shouldn't worry about things you can't do anything about. Just wait and see. If you do, well, I'll stay with you anyway."

"Thanks." She said. She was silent for a moment, then she said, "Ugh, stuck as a boy for two months. What a nightmare."

"Hey!" Ron said, indignant.

"Like you wouldn't complain if you were stuck as a girl for two months."

Ron looked thoughtful. "Well, it would depend on how pretty a girl I was. And how big my boobs were."

"RON!" Iliana shouted.

There was a loud slamming noise, and Luna and Al/Iliana broke apart. Hermione was standing by the window. She was holding something tight in her hand.

"Sorry," she whispered.

"Your potion, Iliana," Luna said softly. "You need your sleep."

They drank it in one gulp. The effect was instantaneous. Heavy, irresistible waves of dreamless sleep broke over them; they fell back onto their pillows and thought no more.

Endnotes: None this time. Just that this isn't quite the end of this half of the story. Oh, and once I figure out a good title for it, I am for sure going to split the rest of the story off into its own half, as this one is getting quite long.


	43. Going Home

" **The Many Faces of Har—er, Adira Potter: Chapter 43"**

By = Fayanora

 **Chapter Forty-three: Going Home**

 **Note 1:** Text in _'Italics and British quotes'_ is Parseltongue.

 **Note 2:** Once more, I apologize for the bits and pieces of canon dialogue/narration here and there. But some canon scenes are just too good to change much. I'm trying to do it less and less.

 **Note 3:** I have different styles for the internal speech of the different Faces of the Potters, but I think these notes have been messing up the formatting, so if you want to know what they are, check a previous chapter.

 **Note 4:** All hail Our Lady Of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling!

 ***FAYANORA***

Alastair was deeply annoyed, aggravated, irritated. He wasn't used to being Out so long. He preferred to let Adira, Iliana, Chandra, or literally any of the others be in control. He preferred, most of the time, to hang out in the background, watching and commenting on things to try to amuse the others. He was the grumpy and sarcastic comedy relief, and he liked that role. Being Out all the time now was hard; it was strangely difficult to let someone take over like this, more of a struggle than just being in the driver's seat, so he was basically forced to either feel like he was a buoy being held underwater, or just to float there on the surface against his desires.

Instead of sitting around and moping, though, he had Hermione bring him some pen and paper so he could plan out what he wanted to do about the Voldemort thing, or to let Hypatia plan things. She still had the power to push the others aside or put them into a sleep, even though such things no longer triggered transformations. Both were, of course, powerless to do any actual magic except maybe potions. Which led Iliana to take turns writing plans, trying to think of how to use potions against the Death Eaters.

From updates he was getting from Sirius, the Ministry was getting worse about pushing the anti-werewolf legislation. Sirius and Andromeda Tonks were fighting it in the Wizengamot, but irritatingly, they were having a hard time getting Dumbledore to join them, for all his claims to be on the side of the light, werewolves were considered dark creatures, and while Dumbledore was all for letting a werewolf be a student and then a teacher, in order to gain the man's loyalty in later years, he didn't seem to be willing to help out others with Remus's condition. Al decided that he was going to take over Dumbledore's spot on the Wizengamot some day to put things right.

Bored in the hospital wing, he read books that he had Hermione get for him, books about the history of anti-werewolf legislation, and wizarding law in general. One of these instances, he'd gone into a screaming fit of anger after reading that Newton Scamander, the author of the definitive book on magical creatures in the wizarding world, had been the one to push for the werewolf registry. He had thrown the book across the room, too, startling Hermione and Javier both. Hermione had needed to repair the book with her wand, and Javier had needed to try to calm Al down.

Al also was thinking about trying to get the assistance of some reporter who would be willing to tell the truth about the Potters and to tell their side of things. But he only knew one reporter. Rita Skeeter had been strangely silent after the debacle at the Triwizard Tournament's final task, and it was making him anxious. It wasn't until he confessed this worry to Hermione that she revealed to him, putting up privacy wards first, that Skeeter was an unregistered animagus, her animagus form that of a fat beetle. Al had laughed for a solid fifteen minutes when she told him she'd captured Rita and had her trapped in an unbreakable glass jar.

Al finally returned to Griffindor tower after being in the hospital wing for over a whole 24 hours, in the evening. He found out from Ron, Hermione, and Luna that Dumbledore had told the school to not pester Al and Cedric with questions right now, and that Cedric had stood up and said that people could pester him – Cedric – for questions, he didn't mind. And so it seemed the story was spreading via Cedric, which was good; Cedric had credibility that Al himself didn't have, and the Ministry couldn't shut them up while they were at school.

He'd been expecting a lot of furtive looks and more people calling him crazy after Skeeter's last article, but thanks to Cedric, there wasn't as much of that sort of thing as he'd feared. Some people were still convinced that they were crazy, and probably always would, but Cedric was verifying their latest crazy tale about Voldemort, at least. Al suspected the Ministry was going to have a lot harder time than they thought at keeping this under wraps.

That evening, a familiar owl tapped its beak on their window. Hypatia had gotten a letter from Draco Malfoy. She immediately pushed Al to the back and took over control of the body, reading it. But the parchment appeared to be empty at first. She stared at the empty parchment at first, then left their room, found Ron in his, and told him to put his wand on it and try several password possibilities for her. It finally worked upon Ron saying "Hypatia Williams," the ink of a letter suddenly appearing on the parchment. Hypatia was actually rather surprised that had worked.

Dear Hypatia,

Hi, it's me, Draco. Haven't heard from you in a while, and I was worried. I mean, I get it, you have to hide who you really are, but according to Diggory, the dark lord is back. I wrote Father about it, and while nobody reading his letter without knowing the family code would be able to tell, he confirmed the rumor for me. You're a half-blood, right? Well, I'm pretty sure you're against the dark lord, so I'm recommending you keep quiet about being against him, so he doesn't have reason to target you. He won't come out into the open yet, not with the Ministry trying to keep it under wraps, but Father doesn't know how long that's going to last. I have to agree; the whole school knows, so all their parents and family are soon going to know as well, if they don't already from all the owls that have been flying around lately. Fudge may be powerful, but this isn't going to stay quiet for long, no matter how hard he tries.

Something else you should know about; father doesn't know where Rita Skeeter is. It seems strange that she disappeared as the dark lord rose, but reading between the lines of father's letter, he doesn't think the two things are directly connected. He's reasonably sure the dark lord would tell him if he'd had Skeeter eliminated, and there wasn't any reason for him to go after her. So it's a mystery.

Father is more upset than he wants to admit, I can tell by the way he wrote his letter. When he's upset, he lets little things slip into his writing. I don't think he knows I can read so much into his writing, so I believe he's genuinely upset. From the clues I gleaned from his letter, the dark lord is angry that Potter and Cedric survived, and also at the fact that one of the Death Eaters was killed in the fight, as Cedric said. I'm not sure, but I think the man who was killed in the fight was Vincent Crabbe's father. Crabbe isn't going to be happy his father died, once he gets over the shock. Potter will have a hard time from Crabbe next year because of it, I think. Crabbe was taken away at breakfast and nobody's seen him return, which is why I think it was his father who died. Goyle isn't saying anything, but I think Goyle knows Crabbe went home.

Al thought as Hypatia read the letter. He felt mildly bad for Crabbe losing his father, but the man had made the choice to join Moldyshorts, and to then return when his Dark Mark burned.

Anyway, I'm guessing the dark lord isn't in a very good mood, with people knowing he's back and one of his few free remaining followers dead at Potter's hand. Which I have to say, I'm rather impressed with despite myself. Given Father's tone of shock, whatever Potter did was impressive enough that Father is still upset about it. Makes me kind of curious, actually. Not like Potter is ever going to tell me, though.

Well, if you can let me know somehow that you're alright... I have no reason to think you're not, but I just need the reassurance anyway, with Skeeter gone under mysterious circumstances, and the dark lord back. So please, let me know you're alright? Even if I don't get to see you, just hearing back from you in your handwriting would make me feel better.

Yours sincerely,

Draco

PS = Blank the page again by saying my full name with your wand touching the parchment.

At the end of the letter, Draco had drawn a sad-faced dragon.

"Huh. He really fancies Hypatia, doesn't he?" Ron asked.

"Yes, he does seem to fancy me," Hypatia said. Ron looked confused a moment, since they were still stuck as Al, then shook his head.

"Right, should've known it'd be you reading the letter, Hypatia."

She nodded, still looking at the letter. "His full name is Draco Lucius Malfoy," she said.

"Right," Ron said, blanking the letter for her with his wand and the name.

She rolled up the letter and put it in her pocket. "I've got somewhere to go later tonight, around midnight. Don't try to follow me."

"Where are you going? Or, er..."

"It's fine. The less you know, the better. I just need to retrieve something I want to take home with me over the summer."

"Right. Gotcha. Are you gonna be able to get there without your magic?"

"The invisibility cloak still works. And I already changed the password weeks ago, once I knew I could."

"Password? To what?"

She sighed. "Fine. I've been hiding some of my stuff in the Chamber of Secrets. And I changed the password. It's no longer 'open' in Parseltongue. It's now the Parseltongue equivalent of... something much longer. An entire sentence, one Voldemort won't be able to guess."

"Don't say the name!" Ron snapped. When he calmed down a little, he added, "Are you gonna be able to say a Parseltongue password without your magic?"

"I don't know."

She concentrated. Then she said a bunch of hissing and spitting, a long string of it. Aqua poked her head up out of her enclosure. Hypatia guessed she was saying something in Parseltongue, but she couldn't understand it. She said something else to the snake. The snake tilted her head as though confused, but then slunk back down to curl around her warm rock.

"What did you say to Aqua?"

"Well, I was trying to say 'I can Speak but not Understand right now.' But I have no idea if I managed it. I've never actually said that before. I had to piece it together from other memories. I can hear the differences between different Parseltongue words in my memory, and I can remember what they meant, but I'm not sure I managed to say that right. Anyway, I'm going to go to my own room now."

"See you later," Ron said.

When she got back to her room, she took out a new piece of parchment and wrote Draco a letter.

Dear Draco,

I'm fine. Hiding again, as you guessed. Sorry, I don't think I'll be able to meet you in person before school gets out, nor over the summer. I wish I could. I miss you. I miss working with you. I look forward to doing that again next year, if we're both still coming here.

Thanks for the information. Not sure what to do with it, but thank you anyway. You aren't going to go after Potter, are you? He was just trying to survive, it's not his fault that Crabbe's father got killed in the process. That man made his choice to work with the dark lord, it's his own fault if he got caught in the crossfire. Sorry, I don't mean to sound unsympathetic, it is pretty sad that Vincent lost his father. I just hope you don't blame Potter for defending themselves. Can you really say you wouldn't do the same if you were in their position?

Also, if you could avoid goading Potter in general, that would be nice. I don't want to think what I'd do if they hurt you in retaliation for something you said to them. If they try to goad you, you should try to be the bigger man. It'll make you look more impressive in the end, and make Potter look petty. Your brash tendency to mouth off to them is far more Griffindor than Slytherin, I suggest you work on that. What can they really do to you anyway, in the long run? All they have are sharp words. You're far cleverer than they are, except when you let your temper control you.

Anyway, I hope you have a safe summer. I'll try to keep writing as much as possible. I'll come up with a more secure communication method than this, one I can actually afford and feel comfortable with. Don't you get any ideas on that front, I have to hide my true self at home, too. Don't send me anything else until I send you what I've come up with, okay?

Yours sincerely,

Hypatia

Later that night was... difficult. She got to the Chamber fine under the cloak, but it took 10 tries to get the password right, and she'd had to argue with Moaning Myrtle between attempts 4 and 5, slowing her down. But she finally got it. She hadn't told Ron the password because she didn't want him knowing she had a sense of humor, but the new password was the Parseltongue equivalent of "Lord Voldemort eats his mother's short shorts and sorts sports equipment in forts for money of sorts, of course." It was not only memorable and something he'd never guess in a million years, it was also a bit of a tongue twister in both languages, even worse in Parseltongue than English. The thought of Voldemort saying it made her giggle as she slid down the cleaned slide into the Chamber. She giggled, as well, at the thought of the look on his face when he found the password had been changed. Clearly he hadn't thought to do it himself, the thought of other Parselmouths in the school apparently never occurred to him.

The rest of the night went well. She got her things, the Basilisk stayed asleep (she'd told it to hibernate the last time she'd been there, and it had), and she made it back to Griffindor tower without getting caught. As she made her way back, she wondered if Moody had gotten his eye and pegleg back, or if Crouch Junior had taken them. If he'd taken them, that would be a problem, not just for Moody. She made a note to have one of the others-no, she changed her mind. She'd ask him herself. It's not like he'd know who she was.

Moody was still in the hospital wing the day before the Leaving Feast. It was difficult talking to him, because he was more paranoid than ever, and only let her ask him questions after Madam Pomfrey confirmed she was powerless for two months. He glared knowingly at her, but she didn't know if he'd been told or he'd guessed as to why she was mundane for now.

As it transpired, Crouch had indeed stolen the eye and the leg. That was going to be a problem. Crouch was an expert at pretending to be Moody. She and the real Moody, therefore, established a password for the next time they met. Moody looked proud of them for that, but also a bit mixed up inside, since the fake Moody had been the one to teach her that kind of paranoia.

Another change was that Moody had used his wand to shave his own head, burn the hair, and attach a wig to his head in its place. It wouldn't stop Crouch Junior if he still had Polyjuice with Moody's hair in it, or if he'd taken more of Moody's hairs with him before escaping, but it would prevent future hair stealing. Moody had even burned his own eyebrows off, was trying to work out if he could manage without eyelashes, and recommended to Al that he do the same. Moody was also wearing an eye patch over the empty socket his magical eye had been in, to protect others from losing their lunches.

At the leaving feast, Al saw Madame Maxime and Hagrid had made up. Well, he'd known that after visiting Hagrid recently, but this was proof.

Al looked around the room more. This year's inter-House championship had been very close, but in the end Hufflepuff had won. Al liked this turn of events. One of theirs had tied with Al for the Triwizard Tournament, had faced Voldemort and lived to tell about it, and now they'd won the inter-House championship. It was a good year for Hufflepuff.

Dumbledore stood up. "The end of another year," he said. "Congratulations to Hufflepuff for winning the inter-House championship for the first time in many years. It is well deserved, and long overdue.

"By now, you have no doubt thoroughly interrogated Cedric Diggory about what he and Alastair Potter experienced in the graveyard they were transported to during the Triwizard Tournament. But for those who haven't yet heard, these two brave boys faced Lord Voldemort-" he paused for the gasps and shouts to subside, "they faced the dark lord and managed to survive by working together and thinking quickly on their feet. There is other evidence of this as well. One of the Death Eaters was killed in the fight, and by now most of you have probably heard that Mr. Vincent Crabbe's father has been reported dead. I wish this were a coincidence, but it is not. Please try to remember, next year, not to bother Mr. Crabbe about his loss. Or sooner, if you happen to see him over the summer. Vincent is not his father, he does not deserve to be punished for the mistakes of his father.

"The Ministry of Magic does not wish me to tell you any of this. It is possible that some of your parents will be horrified that I have done so — either because they will not believe that Lord Voldemort has returned, or because they think I should not tell you so, young as you are. It is my belief, however, that the truth is generally preferable to lies."

Stunned and frightened, every face in the Hall was turned toward Dumbledore now. Even Draco looked worried. Al didn't think he was any less of a blood bigot than he'd been before, but the former Death Eaters had been doing pretty well for themselves, infiltrating the government and influencing its policies in relative safety after Voldemort fell from power. Al thought they had as much to fear from his return, if not more. But they would follow him anyway, because they were scared. Whether for themselves or the children they now had, but still scared. Fear was a powerful motivator, sadly.

"Going back a little," Dumbledore said, cutting through the continued mutters, "as I said, Cedric and Alastair survived by working together and thinking on their feet. I commend this attitude. We will all need to bind together in teamwork and fellowship to get through the coming war and defeat Voldemort once and for all.

"The Triwizard Tournament's aim was to further and promote magical understanding. In the light of what has happened — of Lord Voldemort's return — such ties are more important than ever before."

Dumbledore looked from Madame Maxime and Hagrid, to Fleur Delacour and her fellow Beauxbatons students, to Viktor Krum and the Durmstrangs at the Slytherin table. Krum, Al saw, looked wary, almost frightened, as though he expected Dumbledore to say something harsh.

"Every guest in this Hall," said Dumbledore, and his eyes lingered upon the Durmstrang students, "will be welcomed back here at any time, should they wish to come. I say to you all, once again — in the light of Lord Voldemort's return, we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided. Lord Voldemort's gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

"It is my belief — and never have I so hoped that I am mistaken — that we are all facing dark and difficult times. Some of you in this Hall have already suffered directly at the hands of Lord Voldemort. Many of your families have been torn asunder. Already we have lost two Ministry officials at Voldemort's hand, Bertha Jorkins and Bartemius Crouch Senior. We almost lost Alastair Potter and Cedric Diggory to him as well. I pray we do not lose anyone else to Voldemort. And the most certain way to help bring that wish to fruition is to tell your parents and other family members that Voldemort has returned, warn them to be wary of strangers and to take measures to guard against Death Eaters disguised as loved ones with Polyjuice Potion. As my good friend Alastor Moody says, 'Constant vigilance!'

"So go forth and spread the word. Show the Ministry that the truth will out. For the faster we can admit the truth and begin to fight Lord Voldemort, the faster we can end this war, and the more lives we can save. For he will not yet be ready to make his move. He will need time to regroup, to gather his forces, and that job will be made much more difficult for him if everyone is on their guard, if everyone is informed and vigilant.

"Keep those words in mind this summer, whatever the newspapers may say. And with that, I wish you all a safe summer, until next school year."

Al's things were packed, Hedwig in her cage and Aqua in her enclosure. He, Ron, and Hermione were waiting in the crowded entrance hall with the rest of the fourth years for the carriages that would take them back to Hogsmeade station. It was another beautiful summer's day. He was going back to Sirius's house for the summer, not staying at Hogwarts at all – unable to transform, the Philosopher's Stone was stuck inside of them, so there was no point to staying behind. And anyway, Sirius had a Fidelius Charm on the flat. But according to his godfather's latest mirror-call message, they weren't going to stay there long. There was another Fidelius over a house Sirius had inherited from his family, and as soon as it was cleaned out, they were going to move there.

"Alastair!" came a French-accented voice from behind him.

He looked around. Fleur Delacour was hurrying up the stone steps into the castle. Beyond her, far across the grounds, Harry could see Hagrid helping Madame Maxime to back two of the giant horses into their harness. The Beauxbatons carriage was about to take off.

"We will see each uzzer again, I 'ope," said Fleur as she reached him, holding out her hand. "I am 'oping to get a job 'ere, to improve my Eenglish."

"It's very good already," said Ron in a strangled sort of voice. Fleur smiled at him; Hermione scowled.

"Eez eet true?" Fleur asked. "You are stuck een your current form?"

Al scowled. "What are they saying about that?"

"Just zat you 'ave not transformed seence ze Third Task. Zere are many, ah, possible reasons said for why. Each more ridiculous zan zee last."

"Oh," he said, his face relaxing. "Okay. Well, write me a letter about it, telling me what they're saying, will you?"

"Yes, Alastair, I weel do zat."

"Oh and uh... your owl might not be able to find me now. I'll send Hedwig, she'll be able to find me. I'll wait a week or two before sending her, to give you plenty of time."

She nodded. "Sounds good to me."

"Good. Bye, Fleur."

"Au revoir, Alastair," said Fleur, turning to go. "It 'az been a pleasure meeting you!"

"You too," he said, meaning it.

They met Krum, finding out from him that Karkaroff had nothing to do with steering or running the ship, so the fact he ran away wouldn't stop them getting home. He then took Hermione aside for a private word.

When Krum returned, he got Al's attention.

"I have spoken vith Diggory. He does not blame me for vhat happened in the maze. He has alvays been good to me that vay, even though I was with Durmstrang. Vith Karkaroff."

"Got a new headmaster yet?" Al asked.

Krum shrugged. He held out his hand as Fleur had done, shook Al's hand, and then Ron's. Ron looked as though he was suffering some sort of painful internal struggle. Krum had already started walking away when Ron burst out, "Can I have your autograph?"

Hermione turned away, smiling at the horseless carriages that were now trundling toward them up the drive, as Krum, looking surprised but gratified, signed a fragment of parchment for Ron.

Sirius and Remus appeared then, before they could get on the thestral-pulled carriages. Al looked at them curiously. They had their wands drawn but their hands down at their sides. Al resisted the sudden urge to run; he was getting as bad as Moody. When they were close enough, he stopped them.

"Stop. Password?"

Sirius looked both sad and proud all at once. "'Avani Maznah,'" Sirius said. "Not that it would've mattered if we were Death Eaters. You're powerless right now, and we have wands."

Al nodded, turning to Remus. "Password?"

Remus sighed. "'Tall red and black warmth that clicks,'" he said.

"Good. So you two are my bodyguards?"

"Yes. You're vulnerable on the way home, especially now. We'll be with you the whole way. Sorry, pup."

"It's okay, Sirius. I'm glad for it, actually. Um... should we bring Cedric as well?"

"He can defend himself. He's of age."

"Yeah, but we're talking about Moldyshorts here."

"True. But he'd be mad to attack the train. Even attacking the station would be mad. Fudge is trying to suppress the truth. It won't last long, but should last long enough that Voldemort would be mad to attack the station."

Al shrugged. "Whatever."

Sirius and Remus went with them not just to the train, but on it as well, saying it would be easier than Apparating to Platform 9 and 3/4ths and waiting. More secure, too, since they wouldn't have to do the 'password' thing all over again.

When they got on the train, Sirius and Remus joined Al, Ron, Hermione, and Luna in a compartment, but Sirius said he and Moony could go wander the corridors.

"It's fine," Al said. "Fine by me, anyway. Anyone else object?"

Nobody objected, so Al shrugged, leaning back. He looked out the window, annoyed by the bright, sunny day. It was so much unlike an omen of doom that it was almost an omen anyway, like the calm before the storm.

Cedric opened the door, looking apologetic.

"Mind if I join the honor guard?" he asked.

"Password?"

"'Mighty Mouse.'"

Al smiled. "Come on in, Cedric."

Cedric came in, closing the door behind him.

"Sirius, if you could ward the door? I'd like anything we say here to remain private."

Sirius nodded, and did as asked.

Once the compartment was warded, Cedric spoke. "So I figured, with your magic being out for the next couple of months, that I'd help protect you. Since we helped each other in the uh, um... the graveyard."

"Excellent. Still in school and already I have a minion. Don't worry, I am a benevolent leader."

Cedric chuckled at that, as did several other people. Luna smiled serenely.

"Hmm... you know, I think we're going to need a better system than this password business. Maybe some kind of potion or spell or something that detects Polyjuice Potion use."

"The Goblins have something The Thief's Downfall," Moony said. "I know of it, but I don't know how it works. It's one of those closely-guarded Goblin secrets."

"What does it do?"

"Washes away enchantments, undoes Polyjuice Potion's effects."

Al blinked. Then he frowned. "So why the bloody hell doesn't the Ministry hire the Goblins to install a Thief's Downfall at every entrance to the Ministry?"

Sirius snorted. "Because it's bloody inconvenient. Soaks you to the bone, that's what you said, Moony? Right. Great idea in times of war, if you can get the Goblins to cooperate, but it's not happening until Fudge gets booted out or pulls his head out of his arse, whichever comes first."

"Fudge's head is implanted so firmly up his arse that he can probably see what he had for lunch."

When the laughter died down, Al continued. "I'm not letting the fact I can't use my magic stop me from working to fight Voldemort. I'm going to have to stay indoors all summer anyway, so I'm going to use every spare minute I have working on stuff to fight him. Iliana has her potions, Hypatia has her arithmancy and rituals, and Zoey's no slouch, either. She's working on her own list of things to work on. Then we've got the Weasley twins. They're dead clever, I bet they could turn their minds toward the war effort."

He had a sudden brilliant idea. He dug through his trunk until he found what he was looking for. When he found it, he said, "I'll be right back, gotta find the twins."

Bolting through the door through the slight pressure of the spells on the door, Al went looking for Fred and George. As he did, he passed Malfoy in the corridor. The blond boy sneered at him, but said nothing. Al sneered back, saying nothing as well, even though he'd just come up with a really good insult to throw at Malfoy. Instead, he continued on.

Al found the twins with Lee Jordan, of course.

"Fred, George. Can I talk to you two in private?"

"Sure thing, Al. Lee, we'll be back soon."

"Sure thing," Lee said, still smiling.

Al led the twins into an unoccupied compartment.

"You guys know privacy wards?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Cast every one of them you know."

One of the twins nodded. As he did so, the other one looked curiously at Al. In that moment, Al suddenly missed his heart-reading and their empathic gift, which wasn't working because those took magic. He'd been missing it ever since the graveyard, but it was especially noticeable now, because Iliana had figured out how to tell the twins apart by their empathic fingerprints. Now, he didn't know which was which.

"What's with all the privacy, mate?" said one twin.

"Yeah Al. And why didn't you do the wards yourself? I know you can," said the other.

Al narrowed his eyes. "What gift did you send me in first year, after Quirrell?"

The twins looked at each other, confused, but then smiled. "A toilet seat I think it was, Gred."

"Quite right, Forge. A fine toilet seat it was, too. Classic. Dignified. A throne worthy of a king."

"Good. Not many know that, and even fewer would remember it. So okay, first of all, it's complicated and I don't want to go into details, but my magic is kaput for a couple months."

The twins looked shocked. "You can't do magic?"

"For two whole months?"

"Like, even if your life was in danger?"

Al shook his head. "Don't spread it around. I don't think Moldyshorts even knows."

"Who else knows? Dumbledore, I'm betting."

"Yes. Remus and Luna and Sirius were there when I told the story too. Cedric knows. And then Ron and Hermione know, of course. Now you. Nobody else."

"Fair enough. But I get the feeling you didn't call us in here to tell us that."

"You're right, I didn't. Here," he said, handing them the bag of gold. "I'm investing in your company, on the condition you use some of your resources and brains to help think of weapons to use against Moldyshorts."

"There must be 500 galleons in here! We can't accept this much money!"

"It's an investment. I have a feeling we're going to need some humor in the future. And anyway, like I said, I want your help thinking of weapons even someone whose magic is gone for two months can use against Death Eaters and against Moldyshorts."

"You're sure about this?"

"I'm a bloody millionaire, guys. And so is Sirius. Between the two of us, we're probably richer than the Malfoys. Five hundred galleons is nothing to us, and everything to you. I want Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes to thrive. So if you run out, I can get more."

The twins looked at each other, then at Al. "Well if you're sure, then we accept your terms. Will you be visiting us, or will we be visiting you? Or something else?"

"Not sure. I'll have to ask Sirius. So we have a deal?"

"Yes, we have a deal."

"Thanks, you two. I look forward to seeing what you two cook up over the summer."

With that sorted, Fred and George soon took their money and left. Al went back to the compartment with the others, flatly refusing to talk about what he'd been up to. He got out a pen and paper and started writing out more ideas of their own. Luna sat next to him and leaned her head against his shoulder. He sighed faintly, knowing she wanted to be close to Iliana, not himself. He let her stay there.

After another hour, during which everyone but Al and Luna were talking about this and that, Luna finally moved her head from his shoulder and blew gently on his cheek to get his attention.

"Yes?" he asked, looking at her.

"I hope you don't mind me reading what you were writing, but given what I read there, I thought I should remind you that daddy owns a magazine, called The Quibbler."

"Yes, I know that. What about it?"

"Oh, it's just that Fudge can put a lot of pressure on the Daily Prophet, especially now that Rita Skeeter has vanished. If he can, he'll try to use it to tell lies about you. Daddy would be honored to publish an article about what happened to you and Cedric, to get it out there."

Hermione snorted. They turned to look at her.

"Sorry, it's just... nobody's going to believe the story if it's in The Quibbler, Luna."

"Some might not believe. Others will, though," Luna said.

"Not nearly enough, I'm afraid. He should try Witch Weekly before The Quibbler. More people read it, and more people will believe what it says."

Luna shrugged. "Well, it's an option at least."

"Yes, we can reach out to Witch Weekly. Hell, let's see if we can get the Prophet before Fudge does."

"Oh Al, he's had days and days to lean on them. They'll be on his side by now, I'm sure," Luna said. "Besides, 'Witch Weekly' is owned by the same people as The Daily Prophet."

"Wouldn't hurt to try. Thanks for your offer, Luna, I'll take it under advisement. If we can't find somewhere else to print it, we'll try the Quibbler."

"The circulation of the Quibbler is still an issue," Hermione said. "The only real way to make that work is to spread the word. Besides which, you don't need to do that at all. The whole school already knows the story, they'll be telling their parents."

"The game of telephone," Al said.

Hermione blinked. "Oh. Yes, that's a problem too, I guess. Well we could minimize the degradation of the story by printing it, I guess. But who would write it?"

"I can write it," Luna said. "Daddy says I write very well. Not as good as my paintings, but well enough for a newspaper or magazine."

"Yeah, I don't doubt you're a better writer than Skeeter," Al said.

Hermione looked like she wanted to say something else, but she didn't.

Al was suddenly very tired of being Out. He asked Hypatia to push him down and replace him with Iliana. She sighed, but did as asked.

"Oh god, I'm putting this stuff back," she said. She shoved it into a pocket and turned to Luna.

"Iliana?" Luna asked.

"Yeah, Al got tired."

"Oh good, I'm glad you're back. Even if I can't see your usual form."

Luna leaned her head against their shoulder again, and Iliana took Luna's hand in theirs. Ron looked strangely at the two of them, muttering that it looked weird to see Al's form getting cozy with a girl.

"God, I can't believe how much I've taken this transformation stuff for granted," Iliana said. "This, this is what it's like for most people with our condition. One form, all the time. And I'll bet they have a hard time finding people who believe them about being multiples. And an even harder time dating."

"You're welcome," Luna said.

"What?"

"Oh, I just took that as you saying 'thank you, Luna, for being my friend and girlfriend, and for not finding it too weird to cuddle you when you're in a boy's body.'"

"Ah," Iliana said. "Yes, thank you for that."

"You're welcome, Iliana."

They spent the rest of the train ride leaning against one another, holding hands. They even fell asleep that way. Iliana's sleep was restless, but not as much as it would have been without Luna. Their sleep had been plagued by more nightmares ever since the graveyard incident; part of her mind was awake enough to appreciate Luna's presence.

It was the giggling that woke them up. Lots of giggling, and some of Hermione's chiding as well. When Iliana opened her eyes, she saw Hermione glaring at Sirius. Remus was rolling his eyes, and Ron was struggling to not laugh so he didn't wake them up. Cedric looked amused as well.

"What's going on?" Iliana asked, thrown for a moment by hearing Al's voice instead. She still hadn't gotten used to that.

"Oh honestly," Hermione said. "Sirius, undo it."

A little more awake now, Iliana glared at Sirius. He lost control and barked with laughter, many great guffaws, laughing so hard his face was turning red.

"What did he do?"

"Oh, here," Hermione said, handing her a mirror.

Iliana looked in the mirror, once again thrown by seeing Al's face there. Then she immediately noticed the large handlebar mustache and neck beard Sirius had given them. She sighed, glaring at Sirius. Luna woke up then, and Iliana saw she had a great curly mustache as well, with a curly goatee. Ron lost control along with Sirius at this point, and Iliana showed Luna herself in the mirror. Even Hermione was laughing now.

Luna laughed. And laughed. And laughed. She fell over in her seat, having a full-blown laugh attack, as red in the face as Sirius. She didn't stop, either, so much as pause now and then when she ran out of air, starting back up again when she caught her breath.

Iliana was laughing along with her, too, Luna's laughter having set her off. She was on the floor of the compartment, wheezing, her side in pain as the muscles there cramped up. She had to stop, completely winded, but Luna just kept on going. By now, even Sirius stopped, looking concerned.

"Iliana? Luna? Are you two okay?" he asked.

Luna, who had been pausing to catch her breath, started back up again and laughed so hard she passed out in the middle of a laugh that was more like a wheezing exhalation. She lolled there on the ground, and Remus moved forward to check her vitals.

"She's alive. She just passed out from lack of oxygen," Remus said. "She should be fine."

Luna passing out had put an end to the laughter, but knowing she was fine didn't chase the smiles away.

"Okay, Sirius, you'd better undo it. If she wakes up and sees either of us with mustaches, she might go off again, and her dad'll have to carry her home. Or to Saint Mungo's."

Nodding, though still half-grinning, Sirius used his wand to remove the unwanted facial hair he'd given them. When he was done, Remus woke Luna up with his wand.

When she sat up and saw Iliana, with Al's face now free of the mustache and beard, she burst into laughter all over again.

"So much for that idea," Iliana said.

"Why's she laughing now?" Ron asked.

Iliana sighed. "Probably got reminded of the facial hair by its absence."

Luna did, thankfully, recover from her laugh attack in time to change into street clothes before the train stopped. It was a good thing that she only had to pull off her robes to do it, though, because she was still giggling now and then, and it was messing with her coordination.

Since Sirius and Remus wanted to Apparate directly to the flat from the station, they all said their goodbyes on the train. Iliana promised her friends she'd write often, especially Luna.

"Ready, pup?" Sirius asked when her friends were leaving the train.

"Yes, we're ready now."

Sirius took her hand, they walked off the train together, he led her to the Apparition point, and with a spin and a crack, they Apparated onto the stoop of their flat. An unfamiliar witch walked by, prompting Sirius to raise a wand at her, but the woman took no notice of him at all.

"Good, that means the Fidelius Charm is well and truly working," Sirius said. "No way she wouldn't have screamed if she'd been able to hear that."

Sirius opened the door and poked his head in.

"Seems okay. Come in, pup. Remus should be on his way soon."

No sooner had she stepped forward than Remus appeared with a crack on the stoop. Al took over long enough to demand the new password, which Remus gave. Remus then cast a charm, hominem revelio.A moment later, he nodded.

"Nobody here but us. We're home now."

"Good," Iliana said. "It's good to be home again.

Severus Snape felt a burning on his left arm. Since there was no more school, he set his work down and went out the castle and down to the grounds. He'd been finishing up some work before going home to Spinner's End, but that could wait. The dark lord wanted him for something, and when he called, you ignored it at your peril.

A few minutes later, with a slight pop of displaced air, Severus was standing at the gates of Crouch Manor. Slightly smaller than Malfoy Manor, but cozier, this was the dark lord's new headquarters. The dark lord had been amused by the idea of the house of an old light-side family being used to service the dark. Barty had been pleased. Lucius had not.

Severus couldn't tell Dumbledore where it was, of course; the thing was under a Fidelius Charm. But coming here, that he could do. The dark lord had told him the secret of its location himself.

Severus rang the doorbell and waited. Soon, Goyle Senior came lumbering out to let Severus in. He was glaring at Severus as he did, complaining the whole time. Snape let the commentary wash over him. He had known they would question his loyalty. The dark lord had accepted his explanation, so he didn't really care what the others thought.

When he was let off outside the dark lord's room, Severus tapped lightly enough on the door that it wouldn't bother the dark lord if he was in the middle of something.

"Come on in, Severus," he heard the cold voice say.

He opened the door and went inside, closing it behind him as he did. The dark lord casually warded the door without getting up off his seat. Severus, curious, watched the man very carefully. He thought he saw a slight tremor in one hand, but it could easily have been his imagination.

"Ah, Severus, my old friend. Glad you could join me today."

"I am pleased to be here as well, My Lord."

"Excellent. Have you any news on what the Potter freak did to Crabbe?"

"My Lord, I have been using every spare moment of my days toward the task. I can, at this point, safely say that whatever Potter did, it was... highly unusual. Some sort of ritual, of course. But of what kind, I have not yet determined."

The dark lord glared at him, growling. Severus stood there impassively.

"How could this be?" the cold voice demanded. "How could a child, a fourteen year old freak child no less, have done a ritual powerful enough to kill Crabbe with a patronus?"

"I do not know, My Lord. I have been skipping meals and working well into the wee hours of the morning trying to discover what Potter did. I have combed through dozens of books of rituals, read all the lore about patronuses I could locate, and done extensive arithmancy. I believe I will find the answer, it is just taking a frustrating amount of work to discover it."

The dark lord took a deep, calming breath. "I trust you, Severus. If you say you are doing your best, then I believe you. But tonight I wish you to get at least six hours of sleep. Perhaps a rested mind will aid your quest."

Severus bowed at the waist. "As My Lord commands."

The dark lord coughed several times into his fist, then, looking irritated with himself for the weakness of it. Severus wisely made no comment. But the man was clearly shaking a little, he could see. Something wasn't right with him. Had something gone wrong with the resurrection ritual?

"Unless you have anything else to report, that is all. You are dismissed."

"Thank you, My Lord." Severus turned to go.

"Wait," the cold voice said. Severus turned back to face the man.

"Yes, My Lord?"

The snake-like face looked pensive, hesitant, for almost an entire minute. "Never mind. I spoke hastily. You may go, Severus."

Snape bowed again and left the room, wondering all the way back to Hogwarts what was going on. He immediately went to the headmaster's office to report what he'd seen. Dumbledore would be very interested in this, he was sure.

 **Endnotes:** I found out from a Tumblr post about Newt Scamander's role in the werewolf register, looked it up in the wiki, sure enough there it was. ( wiki/Werewolf_Register ) If I'd had a book to throw across the room in that moment, I would have.

"He got out a pen and paper and started writing out more ideas of their own," is not a typo. It's a switch from singular pronouns to plural pronouns. He's writing down all the ideas of the collective, not just his own.

Also, I've decided there's going to be a lot more divergence from this point on. I hadn't really thought through the ramifications of Cedric being alive, but in retrospect I'm gonna run with it. It might end up speeding things up, but whatever. Let's see where this wild ride takes us.

Oh and yes, I've decided what to call the second half of this story, when I split it up. The second half will be titled, "The Many Faces Go To War." Keep an eye out for that.

I have a slight problem going into year 5. Until now, I've been using Word document files of the different canon books to remind myself what happened in canon and copy/paste some of the bits that can't really be left out. But I only saved books 2 through 4 on my Dropbox before my computer accidentally got Windows reset to factory settings about a year ago, and I don't know where books 5 through 7 are. I have the dead tree formats, of course, but I don't feel like typing from a book I have to hold open with bricks. (They're all paperbacks.) Probably a good thing we're going to diverge, then.


End file.
